If you have read my pages summarising discourse, you may agree that, however interesting and useful the idea of discourse may be, there could be criticism that discourse is only a more sophisticated form of campaigning, or that discourse is just another method of commentating of current affairs.

These criticisms clearly have some validity, so discourse analysis faces a challenge of how it can become a 'full academic discipline' - how can it inoculate itself in advance against these criticisms ?

For this reason Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been developed, and I want to describe CDA as an academic discipline which has developed a range of methods and techniques for working on discourse - finding ways to disentangle the discourses and understand the positions and levels taken up by authors.

I have tried to describe the core of CDA, and some of the major issues it deals with on the following pages:-

The Theoretical Grounding and Objectives of CDA - sjdfh
The Attitude of CDA - its approach to problems - sdkjg
The main concepts of CDA - power, history, ideology, etc
The Potential of CDA - gfafg
CDA as a school - kdfgjadrgf
Power - kfjgoadf

What is power - iihjfdgia
How does power work - kjkljk
Knowledge - kjjklkjg

I have used this material to generate many of the questions in my Discourse Toolbox

(0044)(0) 1372-749803