Discorse Community

Blog post #6

Joshua C. Cook English 1001 (006)

A discourse community is from John Swales’ description “In a discourse community the communicative needs of the goals tend to predominate in the development and maintenance of its discourse characteristics”(Swales pg.20) or a community that is shaped and controlled by its’ goals. Swales tries distinguishing discourse communities from speech communities by defining discourse community with 6 traits. A discourse community which I’m a part of would be the class that I’m writing this post for.

To prove that this class is a discourse community I will compare it to the 6 traits from Swales work. Swales first trait is that there has to be a set of agreed upon goals. In this class the syllabus defines these goals, one goal of this class is “identify, respond to, and write effectively for various rhetorical situations”. The second trait is the members have a system of communication. Members of this class communicate in the comment section of each others posts and can send each other emails. Which leads to the third trait, members use their communication to primarily provide feedback and information. This trait is also meet by the class with the majority of the posts providing feedback and helpful tips or suggestions. Discourse communities “possess” a genre or genres, this is the fourth trait. The genre of my class would be composition or how to compose writing. Having a specific lexis would be the fifth trait. The lexis of this class would be our key terms that we use in our writings such as “Genre, Audience, and Rhetorical situation.” The sixth and final trait would be, members have a threshold that members have to meet with discourse knowledge and relevant content. This class has that as well, there was a placement test to see if you could get into this class or an other class that had to be taken. Their is also different levels of membership, the Instructor being the expert and the students being the novices.

A discourse community that I’ve had trouble assimilating to would be this hearing impaired support community. I’ve always had trouble assimilating with this group because I really don’t notice my impairment most of the time and when I do it doesn’t bother me. This lead me to leaving the community, because I didn’t feel like I contributed or received anything from going.