The Discourse and Rhetoric Group is home to a community of academics, postgraduate students and visitors.

We have a dedicated space which houses our 'laboratory' and has comfortable room for data sessions and other small round-table discussions. In a larger room, about twenty of us - staff, students and visitors- meet weekly in termtime for general discussion of data and theory.

On the bedrock of traditional scholarship we have been building facilities to allow analysis of digitally based materials - text, talk and images. Working with digital materials has the advantage of instant access, easier transcription, and simpler editing and selection.

The laboratory has facilities for digitizing from audio and videotape, and burning those records onto CDs. An increasing interest in studying records of natural interaction has led to more of a focus on the use of video materials.

We are also building extensive archives of materials that have come out of different research projects.

Our community includes a number of students from all over the world. They pursue research into a broad range of topics whose family resemblance is clear but hard to pin down. Certainly all are interested in language, how it is used socially, and what effects it has in interaction and in text.

The specific topics of study, and the methods our students use, range from the meanings of public monuments to the conduct of family therapy, and from rhetorical analysis to conversation analysis. All are welcome here.

We shall be putting more of our work, and work in progress, online. For the moment we have chosen one general paper to present. It is about the do's and don'ts - as we see them - of discourse analysis.

The student interested in Conversation Analysis may like to have a look at our online CA tutorial. This will give a sight of one of the strands of theory and method that make up DARG's fabric. There are many other equally important strands - ethnomethodology, rhetoric, broader discourse analysis, and others, and we hope at some point to have equivalent tutorials in those.

If you are a student interested in finding out more about studying for a postgraduate degree with us, we would be delighted to hear from you.

In the first instance, contact the staff member whose interests seem to be closest to your own - consult the list under 'People' in the side bar.

You will also find general information about studying at Loughborough on the Social Sciences Department's home pages.