In everyone’s life, there are some very significant things and some very insignificant things. These are determined by each individual and varies. In Gee’s Building Tasks article he talks about the seven building tasks of Discourse. One of them is significance, Gee states “But for many things, we need to use language to render them significant or to lessen their significance, to signal to others how we view their significance” (Gee 32). We use language to communicate to others why something is significant to us and why it should be to them. On the IMRAD cheat sheet, the I (introduction and importance) aspect describes why the research is necessary and why the reader should care, “convince readers that it is important that they continue to read” (Carnegie Mellon University). As the writer, you have to use Gee’s task of significance to convince the reader by using language to tell them it is significant and why it is.

 

Being in a Discourse comes with a sense of doing particular skills. These skills help identify those who are in and aren’t in a specific Discourse. Gee describes practices as an essential building task, he states that a practice is a “socially recognized and institutionally or culturally supported endeavor that usually involves sequencing or combining actions in certain specified ways” (Gee 32). These practices makeup Discourse and are essential to it. In Hass’s article, Learning to Read Biology, she develops the idea of rhetorical reading and develops the idea of a rhetorical frame, “Elements of the rhetorical frame include participants, their relationships and motives, and several layers of context” (Hass 48).  This practice is essential to be a part of the scientific Discourse. In order to understand scientific texts, one must read in a rhetorical sense to understand the bigger picture of the text, thus understanding more of the Scientific Discourse.

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