An Affinity for Writing

Paul James Gee first discussed “affinity groups” in his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Language, Learning, and Literacy (Gee, 2007). Affinity groups are defined as the people that operate within a semiotic domain. You may ask yourself, “What in the heck is a semiotic domain?” Well, that’s just a fancy academic term for a place or where people use specific symbols or language to interact. Lets take, for example, a chemistry professor. This chemistry professor, lets call him Professor C teaches upper-division chemistry at a prestigious university. Every semester science majors fill his classes, textbooks in hand, laptops open, with a loose grasp of what exactly the periodic table is. Professor C is counting on this basic understanding, because he knows something that some of them also know, chemistry is difficult. There will a whole new language for them to learn, and there are numerous symbols used in chemistry that many students will have never seen before. In this example, Professor C belongs to the affinity group of chemist. He belongs to this group because he can understand and use the language and symbols of that particular semiotic domain (chemistry). If there were a students in his course pursuing chemistry as a profession for themselves, he or she would be in a similar situation that Keri Franklin found herself in when venturing into Twitter.

Keri Franklin describes feeling “unsteady, vulnerable, and scared” while attempting to join the affinity group of Twitter. She describes feeling what every student often feels when learning to become literate in an unfamiliar genre. Whether it is learning the language conventions of chemistry, Twitter, or academic thesis writing, most learners would take the same approach that Franklin took. They would enlist help from those that belong to that affinity group. Much like Franklin did from her colleague @tmmaerke. The learner would likely read materials related to that particular genre. Franklin poured over Twitter posts for some time before she felt comfortable enough to contribute with her own post. The learner would likely consider their audience. This is a natural process; we all write and communicate in particular ways, in particular context, and in the presence of particular people. Franklin had to consider that she was writing for an audience of professionals and colleagues, and that people she did not even know may distribute her writing through endless channels. The learner would likely learn the new vocabulary and language conventions just as they had learned their early print-literacy skills during primary education, through practice. Like Franklin, when learning the rules of a particular semiotic domain, a learner must be able to ask questions, make mistakes, and experience successes within the context of that domain.