Essay On Discourse Community

In his essay “The Concept of Discourse Community,” John Swales, an educator and researcher, establish the definition of a discourse community. He argues that there is a difference between a speech community and a discourse community. According to John Swales, there are six defining characteristics for a group to be a discourse community. He then gives an example and discusses further issues regarding the concept of a discourse community. While the purpose of this essay is to acknowledge the readers about the characteristics of the discourse community with some explaination about each characteristics. He also establishes a formal tone to the readers. This work is significant because it provides some usefull information about discourse community so that the readers can know which discourse community they belongs to.

To be a part of a discourse community, one must be credible, possess factual knowledge and draw on the values of its members to be accepted into the community. At the same time, a person must learn typical ways people in that community communicate and argue. They share a certain genre—type of writing. Members of discourse communities provide information and feedback that are imperative in order for that discourse community to grow. In the following paper, I will discuss three discourse communities and a genre that they typically use: people who read Nutritional Facts religiously, college students, and industrial organizational psychologists.

In order to be accepted into a discourse community, a person must learn typical ways people in that community communicate and argue. In this paper I will prove that I entered the discourse community of my high school soccer team by acquiring knowledge, establishing my credibility, and learning the game I love. In other words, I will be using the ethos, logos, and pathos appeals. I love to play soccer and watch the professionals who play on TV. I have played since I was ten years old and always played in a city league team. The requirements of being part of the team were simple but at the same time very hard. I was recently part of my high school soccer team, the Crowley Eagles. People might

Life is like a massive highway that have infinite routes anyone can choose take to reach some type of designated goal. Those various routes lead to distinct exits, where one can discover a group or groups that share similarities dealing with viewpoints, beliefs, or understanding towards a particular goal. These groups can be identified as discourse communities. According to, “The Concept of Discourse Community,” in the textbook, Writing About Writing, John Swales stressed that in order to be classified as a discourse community the group has to have all six defining characteristics. Swales emphasized, “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals, mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, utilities and hence processes one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, acquires specific lexis, and has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discourse expertise” (Swales, 221-222). Keeping this key detail in mind, there is numerous type of discourse out there.

A discourse community is a group of communicators with common goals or purposes that use communication to achieve these goals. A disclosure community goals influence specific genres it uses, and the expectations for communication. Some students here in college have yet to know what they want to major in. Being in the disclosure community has many different options to chose from. The varieties go from radio broadcasting to audio mixing. There is also sports analysis and Video production. The specific major that I chose was video production. As I said before many college students are undecided in what they want to major in, and for me I believe that majoring in a communications class like this is highly recommended.

Education may be the mold of our future, but the mold behind education is teachers. Behind all intelligent students lays a common factor, teachers. This paper will be focused on the discourse community which lays within the walls of James Bowie Elementary in Richardson, Texas. From interviews and observations to external research, I have been able to find and understand the most important aspect of this chosen community, communication. Communication is a vital role in this community because not only is it the way that they communicate with their peers, but when teachers communicate with each other they are showing their students how to do it. To begin, I brainstormed about my knowledge of this community. From the time I was a child to now,

Present a clear picture of your discourse community. Who are its members? What specialized language/texts/rituals are associated with it? Why should it be studied at all? You should have discussed these ideas in your research proposal. Here is where you realize them with materials you gathered from your discourse community.

A discourse community is defined as a group of people involved in and communicating about a particular topic, issue, or in a particular field. We all belong to multiple discourse communities.To earn a position of a discourse community one must possess accurate knowledge, establish reliability of members to be accepted and learn to persuade other members of the community. The discourse community that I identify with personally and the profession I plan to pursue is the world of film production. However, there are many jobs that need to be done on a film set leading to there being multiple discourse communities within the film industry, what I want to focus on specifically is the DP, otherwise known as the “director of photography”. According to “The Concept of Discourse Community,” by educator and researcher John Swales, a discourse community is defined by six characteristics.

Two definitive works done by Swales and Porter has helped established on the definition and criteria of a discourse community. While Swales was the primary source of information for Porter’s own piece, Porter can develop a more in-depth view on discourse communities.

​A discourse community is a group of individuals who share objectives, customs, and experiences. Arguably, an individual may have several discourse communities. For example, the said person could belong to a running community, food’s enthusiast community, a family, and a student community, which is also a discourse community. In some cases, these discourse communities may overlap as they share commonalities. More specifically, is the English class as the discourse community where students share perceptions of the course workload and how these perceptions influence their grades.

According to Swales a discourse community is created with six defining characteristics that are “made up of individuals who share a broadly agreed upon set of common public goals; further, it has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, uses it participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, [that] has or uses one or more genres that help group achieve its shared goal, has acquired some specific lexis and has a reasonable ratio of novices and experts” (Swales, 795). To explain Swales’ concept, I have chosen to apply his six characteristics, necessary and sufficient for identifying groups as a discourse community, to analyze my united states history one class, taught by Mrs. Medley, along with some feedback I retrieved from both a fellow student and my professor.

A discourse community might be considered a “class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes” (Kehus, Walters and Shaw, 1). This concept is particularly useful if defined as a social relation of participants who share some set of communicative purposes: common public goals, mechanisms of intercommunication and participation. Greek life in American universities can be considered a discourse community, since they share a particular type of communication: having a sister/brotherhood with people who share similar characteristics in their way of thinking, while accomplishing the expected values of their organization. Fraternities or sororities (sometimes called women’s fraternities) can be thought as

Recently in class we’ve broached the topic of discourse communities, in order to better understand how concepts of rhetoric appear and are used in our daily lives. As such, I’ll be writing about a community of my own as a form of analysis if you will, to better understand these concepts of communication. While my intent is to try and showcase examples of ethos pathos and logos, who knows what you may take away from it. Perhaps you find a new way of interacting with your own friends, or perhaps you’ll just find a way of looking at your own interactions from reading about my own.

to other students on their essays and give recommendations on changes they would make or parts of the essay they could work on. During free writes, I was able to express my thoughts on the assigned readings such as Swales and UNC; I wrote about what I thought about the readings and what main points stood out to me. Worksheets handed out in class are also a form of informal writing. For example, this worksheet about A “discourse community tends to be a Specific Interest Group” asked me questions on the six concepts of a discourse community and I input what I believed was related to a discourse community; no answer was fully correct or incorrect.

I have become a member of the Economics Club for more than two years now, and I have never regretted doing so. The club provides its members a chance to build a community among students who share a common interest in Economics while acquainting ourselves with economic research and related field. Moreover, my experience of being a member at Economics club presents to me an introduction to the concept of discourse community, as Linguist John Swales defines, which is constituted by six different characteristics, as a threshold level of members with relevant content and experience in achieving their common goals by means of communication through utilizing mechanisms of intercommunication among members, participatory medium to inhibit feedbacks and information exchanges, genres, and specialized terminology (Swales, 471). As I come to aware that we inherently belong to certain discourse communities; our religious background, ethics, educational level as well as our personal interests and activities are examples of discourse community which empowers us to construct our own social networks. What caught my attention here is it is common that many discourse communities choose to employ diversified genre in the communication of their aims. Through utilizing the functionality of each form of communication possesses helps such discourse community to establish a more refined and adequate communication processes among members. Taking this into consideration, the broad members of Economic