Academic Discourse again

This week’s articles and the last one’s give good examples of the problem of discourse they try to solve and show how intricate for specialists this problem is. The problem, in my point of view, is not discourse itself; the problem is the way we look at discourse. In the four articles that we have studied so far discourse is defined as the traditional academic language we use in our classrooms, essays, or publications. And this is a narrow meaning of discourse. In fact, discourse is a group of non-congenial things that produce a meaning. In the case of the academic discourse, the discourse will be us (instructors, scientists, and students), our culture (including language), the principles and rules of science, and the educational institutions, all of which are historically bound and all of which affect the type and quality of the discourse.
According to this definition, Royster’s statement that “ academic discourse, like all language use, is an invention of a particular social milieu, not a natural phenomenon” is not precise. This is because she excludes the nature of science in forming our language. The fact is that the type of science overdetermines the type of language we use. For example, in Physics we use a language that is scientific because we deal with a field that is concrete and rule-governed. In contrast, in philosophy or literature, our language she should be conjectural, emotional, and imaginative because our interest is in values, emotions and senses.
The other idea I find strange in the reading is that only traditional academic discourses are objective, argumentative and skeptical. What about our home discourses? What is the clause “I don’t think so”, that we use in our daily conversations, about? If I say to you this is an interesting film and you respond by saying I do not think so, this means that you want to start arguing; you want to present antithesis; you want to convince me with a different idea. Likewise, if I say to you I saw a ghost yesterday and you respond by saying are you serious?, you are posing a question; you are doubting; you are asking for facts; What I want to communicate here is that our home discourses have the same traits as academic discourses do; but what they differ in is the context and style. In home discourses, the conversation is between two or more people who speak face to face or through signals and who maintain the conversation by feedback. In academic discourses, on the other hand, the conversation is between a writer and a reader one of whom is absent. And here lies the problem. When students move to the new academic discourse, they do not realize the fact that they will maintain a conversation with a different nature in which they will be either readers or writers; a conversation in which their partners are unknown.
The other difference between the two discourses is the style. In home discourses, we use colloquial language which depends on abbreviations, reduction and informal lexicon. In contrast, academic discourses make use of standard language with formal vocabularies and structures.