Competing Discourses

This scene is from the movie Mr. Deeds with Adam Sandler.  To set this scene up, Deeds (Sandler) is a small town guy with a small town life who finds out he has a very rich uncle that left him everything when he suddenly dies.  He is brought to New York under the notion that he will sign away his uncle's company in return for a large settlement.  In this restaurant, he becomes involved with the high society folk that are typical social friends of people with his now high fortune and success.  Obviously a conflict will occur...

The two competing Discourses are extremely evident.  According to the book Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook, the two Discourses are competing in the realm of their Secondary Dominant Discourses because the obvious differences between the two types are status, wealth, class and education. 

Deeds has the Primary Discourse of a middle-lower class man.  He grew up in a small town, but in his town he owns a business and is relatively successful.  He is greatly loved by the townspeople and lives a fulfilled and happy life.  However, as he travels to New York he finds that he is now simply lower class, not loved by everyone, less educated and inferior to the upper part that he is introduced to.  The table of "elitists" with whom Deeds and his date join for dinner have a very dominant and superior ere to their speech, actions and behaviors.  They most likely grew up in a high society with avid culture experiences, higher education, lots of money and very few hardships.  They don't understand or respect Deeds, his background or his future because they have already perceived him as being a lesser person than they.  In a way the Discourses are aligned because they are dealing with similar issues in opposing directions, but at the same time they are not aligned because one is trying to fit in (Deeds) while the others keep him out as he is not a bred member of their particular Discourse.  The effect is Deeds' anger and protective instincts that arise because of his ultimate denial.  That often happens as a defense mechanism when someone from an outer Discourse tries to learn and become a member of another Discourse.  The insiders always know an outsider and often point them out to the point of humiliation.

Writing No-Nos...

• In middle school, I was taught that when using ellipses, only use three!  In fact, overusing any kind of punctuation is a terribly wrong thing to do when writing.  No one wants to read through a dozen things in parenthesis, a sentence with a million question marks and exclamation points or a sentence with colons and semi colons out the wazoo.  
• When asking "where are you?" or "what time is it?", there is no use for the word "at" added at the end. Ex. "Where are you at?"... my mother used to answer me with "behind the A-T."
• I was taught in high school to avoid sentences that begin with "the" as well as "but."  I frequently replaced "but" with "however" though.
• Generally, I am a very wordy person when I speak as well as when I write.  I was corrected by my AP language teacher very early on in high school.  She told me to say what I needed to say in the least amount of words possible.  No one wants you to get to the point in a roundabout way. This awful habit includes my tendency to be redundant.  Repeating things is often unnecessary, even if I think I haven't explained it well the first time.  I just need to fix the first go around instead of adding a second.
• When I was very young, I was taught that all ending punctuations go INSIDE the parenthesis if there are any.  I had a lot of trouble with that one when I was young.
• Subject and verb agreement! This needs no explanation.  But I unfortunately did not learn this until high school. I had poor middle school grammar education.
• The above bullet point is an example of a bad habit I still run into- thinking fragments can be sentences.  They cannot be sentences, ever.  
• Spelling hasn't really ever been an issue for me, but I have run into times when I thought I knew what a word meant and was corrected because I was entirely wrong and it made my sentence and idea incorrect, as well as confusing. 

I'm sure there are many more rules that I have been taught over the years, but I suppose they are so far burnt into my brain that they are second nature and therefore not at the surface of my mind.  Nevertheless, these are plenty to go off of...