Some months back I reported that my linguistic friends and I planned to read and discuss The Practice of Critical Discourse Analysis by Meriel Bloor and Tom Bloor.

Since then, we have been working our way steadily and enjoyably through the chapters. Unexpectedly, we found that the book forced us to make explicit our own basic beliefs and, therefore, to confront them. It was great fun challenging our friends’ beliefs but quite surprising and uncomfortable to face up to our own. As we are in our sixties, seventies and eighties respectively, we have got out of the habit of questioning our assumptions. Particularly on ethnicity and consumerism, we found that our underlying attitudes were very different from one another’s and this led to some hard-hitting arguments. Continue reading →