Home cooks and experienced chefs join forces through the Whisk website and app to bring us recipes, instructions, and advice for cooking at home. So, what do you need to know to be a successful writer within this space? The answer begins with a minor understanding of the concept of Discourse Communities.
Let’s Talk About Discourse Communities
A Discourse Community is a group of people who communicate, or share discourse, with each other. This discourse can be conducted through a variety of ways, in this case, the Disourse Community of Whisk.com communicates mostly through recipes.
Understanding the framework behind Discourse Communities, or DCs, is going to help you learn to write for different audiences. Getting to know the community you plan to write for will help you achieve your specific goals and purposes. .
Linguist John Swales laid out some general criteria to identify a DC. The criteria we will be looking at for Whisk.com are in bold face, feel free to skim over non-bold face criteria.
- An agreed set of goals: DCs are not utopian societies, but often hold a mission statement that is generally recognized.
- A form of intercommunication: a DC does not exist if the members are not able to communicate with each other. Outlets like email and text can be utilized.
- Acceptance of feedback: a DC allows for positive and negative feedback to provide growth and change, only rarely does feedback result in decline.
- Multimodality: a DC uses more than one genre to communicate. These genres can include verbal, written, and body language communication methods
- Specific Lexis: a DC can communicate using abbreviations, short-hands, or codes that have been explicitly or implicitly agreed upon.
- Structure: a DC has some form of hierarchy, whether it was established directly or indirectly.
- “Silential Relations”: members of a DC are able to communicate successfully while not including all that needs to be said. For example, if I asked you what you wanted to eat for dinner, you could say “pizza” and I would understand that you meant “I want to eat pizza for dinner”.
- Expectations: a DC has some form of expectations, whether that be activity, history, or values, a DC maintains expectations.
With this information, you now have what it takes to identify and analyze a DC. So, you may now be wondering, how can I use this information to help me write successfully for Whisk.com?
Using some combination of the criteria above, you will be able to identify what is important to the community and cater your writing to match their expectations.
Follow the Rules
We can discover what is important to the members of the community by finding out what is seen as good vs. bad.
On Whisk.com, simply through making an account, we can see that the website is divided into cuisine specific sections called Communities. This division of recipes already shows us what is important to the community and will help us decide how we want to write, and where we want to post it.
If you want to post a recipe for fried chicken, it will be important to find the right Community to post in. Should you post the recipe in a Southern Food community? A comfort food community? We can tell it is integral for the website to be organized and easy to navigate, therefore we want to adhere to the DCs values and post accordingly and accurately.
- Determine what Whisk.com accepts and what it does not accept, then you will know how to adjust your writing to be well-received.
Don’t be Boring
When scrolling through Whisk.com, we can see that most recipes are accompanied by pictures, links, and other modes of communication. Not only does including multiple genres increase the digestibility of your recipe, it also provides a better chance of reception by the community.
When comparing recipes across the website, we can see that recipes that include pictures are significantly more successful than their non-illustrated counterparts. A recipe with no pictures, or even a blurry picture, received many less positive reviews than a recipe with a clean picture.
Many recipes on Whisk.com also include external links to cooking blogs or websites. This is important to note because including a link also increases the visibility and likability of the recipe. Adding a link provides extra information for viewers who need it, but it also increases your credibility as a recipe creator. Providing a link with your recipe shows that other reliable websites or blogs are using your recipe, and therefore Whisk.com users should as well.
- Check out what recipes on Whisk.com have received a lot of praise and positive feedback. Does that recipe use pictures? Videos? External links?
- Apply the same successful genres (pictures, videos, links, etc.) to your recipe.
Use the Right Words
Whisk.com is a very diverse and wide-spreading community; home cooks of all skill levels interact with a large selection of recipes. So, when writing, it is important to acknowledge the myriad of home cooks who might interact with your recipe. Some terms or short-hands might not be universally recognized due to the variety of technique and ability, and therefore vocabulary.
That being said, there are many terms that are widely understood, and that home cooks accept. For example, when using units, “oz” is a perfectly acceptable replacement for ounce or ounces. Another example of utilizing the correct lexis to write successfully for Whisk.com would be to use general terms like “thin strips” or “small 1-cm cubes”. Professional chefs would use the terms “julienne” and “brunoise” to describe these cuts, and most home cooks would not recognize these.
- Determine what terms are appropriate for Whisk.com users and what terms are too exclusive. Only use accepted terms.
Follow Expectations
The expectations for Whisk.com might seem simple, and they mostly are. Due to the simple format of the website and app, we know that the DC is looking for simple, accessible recipes that fulfill the expectations of the Community where they were posted. This means that a long, involved recipe won’t gain any traction within the DC. A recipe with a 2-hour process and 20 ingredients will get less attention and less positive feedback than a recipe that takes 30 minutes and 7 ingredients to make.
Other expectations include the order and accessibility of ingredients. Whisk.com users anticipate ingredients to be both in order of importance and in order of use. When writing for this DC, you should include the most significant ingredients first, such as protein or starch, and all secondary ingredients last, such as water or seasoning. It is also valuable to group your ingredients according to the order of the recipe. If the first step of your recipe is to boil and mash potatoes, you should include all necessary ingredients in subsequent order.
- Compare some popular recipes to some less-successful ones. What did the successful recipe have that the other didn’t?
- Utilize elements of the successful recipe to boost the likelihood of your own success.
Get Writing!
Now, you understand what a Discourse Community (DC) is and what different factors classify a group of people as a DC. You also know why each aspect of a DC is important and we touched on the most important and relevant elements when writing for Whisk.com.
We established that understanding the goals, multimodality, lexis, and expectations of Whisk.com were the most meaningful aspects of DCs when writing for the website.
- Understanding the goals of Whisk.com will help you determine the structure, style, and content of your recipe.
- Understanding the multimodal elements of Whisk.com will help you determine the layout, genres, and content of your recipe.
- Understanding the lexis of Whisk.com will help you determine what terms you use and the tone of your recipe.
- Understanding the expectations of Whisk.com will help you determine the content, accessibility, and difficulty of your recipe.
Now that you understand each of these factors, you will be able to successfully write a recipe for Whisk.com.
So, get cooking, writing, and sharing!