The discursive community I will discuss in this essay is a small start-up business located in my hometown of Batesville, IN, called The Morel Company (Morel) where I completed a tutoring during high school 2 years ago. Through my mentorship experience, interactions and observations of the management team, I have developed an understanding of the product they produce and sell. Their organizational texts, as well as a general overview of the various social media and marketing tools used to promote their products, as well as attending meetings and compiling various documents, have increased my understanding and interest in this discourse community . Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay I want to provide a little more background on Morel so that my discussions can be elaborated and equated to some of the terms in Intermediate Composition 2089. According to Bill Hillenbrand, President and CEO of The Morel Company, innovation is has been a hallmark of successful healthcare companies and has been an obsession of the Hillenbrand family since 1929. He credits his grandfather, William A. Hillenbrand, with being an enterprising force in the industry. the healthcare sector. His incentives aimed at making patients more comfortable and safer and reducing the burden on nurses led to the development of many innovative products that fulfilled his aspirations with his company, Hill-Rom. That family healthcare ingenuity continued with his father, W August “Gus” Hillenbrand, who always focused on developing products that reduced the workload for healthcare providers and improved patient outcomes. He also had a fervor for continuous improvement, seeking to create products to simplify and be more effective, focusing specifically on patients and caregivers in healthcare settings (Hillenbrand). Bill Hillenbrand's literacy sponsors' push for innovation and continuous improvement (Brandt), as well as his learning of the importance of affinity groups and design grammars (Gee) while working through various positions and departments at Hill-Rom, have left an indelible mark still visible in the market today and in the mind and mission of Mr. Hillenbrand for The Morel Company (Our Story). Morel has conducted ethnographic research in natural settings, such as hospitals, doing interviews, observations, and surveys with hospital staff and patients around the world. countries willing to use the preliminary product, similar to the approaches described by Mike Rose in The Mind at Work (Rose). The nurses and patients at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, were key participants in that ethnographic research. Participants also met and spoke personally, with the aim of designing and developing an innovative new product. As a result of their ethnographic research, Morel began marketing and selling the Hercules Patient Repositioner to customers in early 2014. This new, one-stop patient repositioning device allows a single healthcare provider to lift patients into hospital beds in less than 10 seconds at the push of a button. Morel has already obtained over 15 process and design patents on its products both nationally and around the world. Morel has several affinity groups established within its organizational structure (Gee). It has a management team of 4, an engineering and product development group of 4, an administrative support staff of 3, and 18people in your sales organization. Communication in each semiotic domain is defined by learning and using the design grammars specific to its area. As a result of the affinity group's literacy sponsors (Brandt) and growing knowledge of their specific design grammars (Gee), communication up and down and across the entire organization is essential to ensuring success. This conversational community also has significant social media, marketing collateral, and other sales collateral that is used as key methods of communicating with its customers. Rhetorical Situation Guidelines, which reference Grant-Davie information regarding needs, rhetoricians, audiences, and constraints, are used for appropriateness in use with potential customer groups, service providers, and suppliers (Grant-Davie). Documents are shared regularly with both customers and suppliers, such as quotes, purchase orders, invoices and delivery receipts. Overall, Morel has 3 main audiences that require regular attention and appropriate forms of communication; its employees, its suppliers and its customers, each of which I will talk about later. I chose to write about this discourse community for several reasons. First, my goal is to complete and obtain a law degree. Much legal practice deals with businesses through corporate law, so gaining a general understanding of how businesses operate is extremely important. Morel, through its management, maintains relationships and uses the services of various external law firms regarding intellectual property issues (patents and trademarks), corporate law and business contracts. The second reason I see it as an applicable discourse community is due to my experiences during my mentorship 2 years ago. I learned that business, although small, is a diverse conversational community that encompasses aspects of business, engineering, healthcare, marketing, sales, government, and law, as well as an audience of customers, suppliers, and employees, providing me with many options to analyze and argue for this report (Swales). Finally, Morel uses multiple ways and methods to communicate and reach its diverse audience, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, email, Linkedin, and its own website. These different communications, following Bartholomae's ideas of discourse and cliché in which language and style must be altered and changed based on what and for whom one is writing, offer Morel additional options of documents, texts and methods of communication to use to connect with your audience ( Bartholomae). Overall, through my analysis, I have come to the following conclusion about my discursive community, Morel. I believe Morel, although a small start-up entrepreneurial company, is an exceptional discourse community with its extensive social media network and its wide range of marketing and sales brochures/materials/documents. Like Rose, through my interactions, observations, and discussions with Morel, I have learned that Morel uses these elements extensively to communicate with its audiences of employees, suppliers, and customers (Rose). These elements, interactions and communications are developed to create visual, simple, effective and compelling messages that ultimately persuade or inform Morel's audience to take an action and ultimately grow the business. Although Hillenbrand claims to be unaware of individuals like Swale or Rose and their ethnographic research, Grant-Davie and his rhetorical situations, or Bartholomae and his posts on discourse and clichés, it is obvious that the sponsors of literacy, the groups ofaffinities, semiotic groups, domains, design grammars and research methods that he learned in his life were strong and impactful. From my research, I learned that communication with its employees is important and essential to Morel's management team. In discussing this with Morel management during my mentorship and other recent interactions, it has become abundantly clear how important it is to them to sponsor literacy and create affinity groups and design grammars for employee communication to ensure who understand and are aligned with the company's strategy, in particular many of the sales staff are located throughout the United States and not in Batesville. One of the first things I learned is that they ensure strong affinity groups and design grammar is that Morel management has a standing meeting every Monday morning at 10. I had the opportunity to attend this meeting. Although Mr. Hillenbrand said he is not familiar with Brandt or Gee, he certainly applies their principles. I learned that the purpose of the meeting was to ensure coordination among members of the management team. During the meeting, topics covered include a review of each person's calendar, a status review and update for major engineering and development projects, a review of current open orders, customer quotes, and current forecasts with expected dates delivery and installation, an update on orders we have with suppliers and estimated times for receiving products, a review of financial statements, an overview of the status of current marketing-related projects and a detailed review by regional sales managers Morel of the last week's activities of their direct reporting sales representatives. As Mr. Hillenbrand told me, “Overall, the purpose of this meeting is to ensure our management team is “on the same page,” address any key issues or concerns impacting the company at this time, and get key updates on projects and potential sales orders. It's important that we're all involved and that we hear the same thing from other team members." Having sales reps all over the country, and therefore not in the office, I found that Morel also had a standing call with all these sales reps at 3.30pm every Monday. This call is important to Morel because he wants his sales reps to be “on the same page” again and hear consistent messages from management. They want these people to focus on the epistemologies of the people in their sales area and meet the opinions of their customers in their unique part of the country (Nunley). Additionally, during the call, sales reps serve as literacy sponsors as they share best practices and how they obtain and close orders with customers so they can learn and use these same techniques when applicable (Brandt). Again, Hillenbrand said, “It's really critical to ensure that our people, wherever they are, receive consistent and simple messages and communications to ensure alignment and understanding.” In addition to formal meetings, there is a great deal of informal communication throughout Morel. . These include emails, cell phone calls, walking into another person's office, or simply passing someone in the hallway and discussing or talking about a problem (Howarth). These informal communications or meetings are also important as they take place in a non-formal environment where work or even private personal matters can be discussed. InBottom line, communication with employees is absolutely necessary. A second audience for Morel are suppliers. Morel obtains key parts and components for its repositioning products from suppliers located in Illinois, California, Montreal and China, while other smaller parts are sourced from other areas. Obviously, one can see how important communication with this supplier base would be, given the need to deal with different time zones and alternative worldviews. Therefore, given the different cultures, Morel needs to be informed about what is acceptable or unacceptable in places like Montreal and China (Eldred). They don't want to offend the suppliers they rely on to keep the business running. Consequently, Morel must focus on the epistemologies and the UNESCO model, shared by Eldred, in order not to offend its suppliers. It is truly essential to ensure accurate communication and coordination of these deliveries to Batesville so that Morel can assemble the completed products in a timely manner and meet its customers' delivery expectations. To ensure this, Joe Kummer, vice president of operations, has a weekly call with these key suppliers to discuss open orders, production issues, quality or component concerns, and upcoming forecasts for the weeks and months ahead. Mr. Kummer is a person who in Morel must understand the importance of epistemologies and what form of literacy may not be desirable for a certain group. I learned that a key document used with suppliers is known as a purchase order. The purchase order is a formal document that details the quantities ordered, price, payment terms and estimated delivery dates, so it is a key document used when communicating with these suppliers so that Morel can meet the expectations of its clients. As Mr. Kummer said when I sat down with him during my mentorship, “Our supplier relationships are an important cog in our business processes and require attention to detail and review at least weekly.” Customers are the essence of a business as they ultimately determine its success. Without customers buying its products, a company wouldn't exist. The first point of contact with our customers is our sales representatives across the country who visit hospitals daily and meet with nurses and various members of hospital management. Sales representatives are Morel's front line and voice with customers, continually conducting ethnographic research as they meet daily to discuss any repositioning issues and how the Morel product will assist and help them resolve this issue and provide benefits to both their patients and healthcare workers (Rose). To assist sales representatives, through data obtained through ethnographic research methods similar to those conducted by Rose, Morel has designed and created a significant amount of marketing documents and sales materials that visually show and describe the benefits its products provide to patients and caregivers. I had the opportunity to contribute to the development of some of these documents. I learned the importance of these documents, including using images to show and describe the product and its benefits, creating a very clear, concise and simple message that everyone can understand, and making the document compelling and convincing so that customers purchase the product. In fact, Morel published one of his papers in the July 2015 edition of Wounds Journal, showing the potential problems customers face and how a program using his product helps create a solution to this problem a.