Discourse Communities: Academic Writers
Chris Lowe
I find it's good to redefine your terms especially if you're writing towards a target audience that you're not sure how well they'll understand some of the terminology you're using.

J. Joaquin Fraxedas
And there are phrases that you use constantly that have meaning only to other lawyers and to judges. And you phrase something in a particular way. The simplest sounding thing to say, and a lot of the public is aware. If I say "due process" well, due process is two words, a very simple phrase, but it means an infinity of things to lawyers, I mean there's a whole bunch of cases that deal with due process clause. And when you use that, you use that as shorthand, if you were going to use "proper process," even if "proper" sounded better than "due," you can't. Because what's proper process, we're talking about due…so to some extent lawyers are ham-strung by a whole…they're carrying centuries of legal writing on their backs.

Betsy Klimasmith
One of the nice things about writing in a discipline is even if it's not the discipline that you're eventually going to do, let's say you're never going to write about art again or you really learn what you learn from your writing in the discipline of geography is that you really would rather write in another discipline altogether…the lesson of learning that a discipline has conventions and rules and ideas that are important. But also that those ideas and ways of understanding through writing are things that you can transfer into other kinds of disciplines I think, make a big difference when you're trying to figure out where you fit; what your discourse community is. If there's one at the university that makes sense for you.