Reflection Analysis

A discourse community comprises of a group of people sharing a common and distinct mode of communication or discourse, especially within a particular domain of intellectual or social activity (Oxforddictionaries, 2017). Some of the discourse communities I consider to be a part of, include an Indian joint family, my peer group, high school education in India, the Apple community and education at Pace university.

In the article, “The Concept of Discourse Community,” John Swales defines what a discourse community is, and yet, he strongly argues that a discourse community must meet six specific characteristics. A social group must have a set of common goals, methods of intercommunication between its members, feedback, the usage of genres, a determined lexis, and a rank that defines the level of expertise each member has.

In the first few weeks that I have attended my first year college English class, we have discussed what discourse communities are and how they are integrated into everyday life. Each one of these communities consist of people who share similar goals, have specialized vocabulary, and have a priority to implement a language that mutually enables members to function together towards those goals. A discourse community that I had decided to become a part of a couple of years ago would be the tennis team. The tennis team is in fact a discourse community because it is full of people who share knowledge of a particular topic, similar experiences, values and common ways of communicating. Personally being a part of tennis has its perks and exemplifies the characteristics that make it fit the nature of a discourse community. There are various

A discourse community is a group of people that share a set of common goals and use communication to achieve these goals. My discourse community is the Bartlett High School Band. The band has a set of goals that we set up at the beginning of the year during leadership. I have been a part of this discourse community for three years. I was a part of a similar discourse community for one year, which was the Bolton High School Band. The Bartlett Band is a discourse community that has multiple methods of communication, a set of common goals, and a lexis.

John Swales defines the term discourse communities as "groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals" (Swales). A discourse community is defined by the following six characteristics: The community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals, the community has mechanisms of intercommunication among their members, the community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, the community utilizes and possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, the community also owns genres and has some acquired lexis that are specific to the community in terms of jargon, and the community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discourse expertise. In such communities, members often come as novices, and due to their high level of commitment to the community, they “leave by death or other less involuntary ways” (Swales, 27).

An example of a discourse community I choose to talk about in this paper is the JPS Nail Salon located near Elvis Presley Boulevard. I recently became a part of this particular discourse community group by volunteering to help out on the weekends. I thought it would be interesting to dig a little deeper as to how discourse community works out as a whole.

A Discourse Community is a group of people who have common goals and interest and have a

I am a part of many different discourse communities. I am a college student, a millennial, a nanny, a family member, a friend, and a full time employee. In each aspect of my life, I participate in discourse communities with those around me; with goals, genre, and lexis. Of my discourse community memberships, the one which fit Swales’ definition most accurately would be in my place of work (HisWay).

What is a discourse community? A discourse community is an interactive group that shares common discourses. Meaning that they share a common set of values that similar towards others. Most of society belongs to a discourse community that share values or even similar personalities. The discourse communities I joined needed to reflect my personality. For example, I like culture and I like to involve myself in some culture-based activities such as Art or even Culinary Arts. Ideally experiencing diverse cultures other than my own would directly geared towards my personality traits. Here are a few. My personality is more of an introverted style; it mostly consists of my shyness near groups. I love taking care of children and teaching, but I do not

​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.

A discourse community is a group of people that act the same way, this can occur in a school, in a hobby, a job, or other activities you do with repetition. From a young age, I have learned to be prepared for everything thrown in my way, from talking to people that think differently, to the workload in college. The only thing I can think of that would contribute to this strength is my Scouting career that began when I was six years old. This is my main discourse community, because it has taken me ten years to get to the esteemed final rank of Eagle Scout, so I have a lot of connections established in the community. During the 10 years in which I have had in the community, I had to go to through the ranks of Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts with each rank for Cub Scouts taking a year and Boy Scouts about half of a year.

A discourse community is a group of people who share the same beliefs, who conversate, or have a discussion over a topic of the groups choice. Football teams, school clubs, and activist movements are examples of different types of discourse communities. Religion is a very interesting discourse community. Judaism, Amish, being Catholic are just a few out of the many types of religions. All religions believe in God(s), which makes them a discourse community; which also is one of the requirements that they share a belief.

John Swales defines a discourse community as “a group of people involved in and communicating about a particular topic, issue, or in a particular field” (Swales, 215). He specifies a discourse community through academics; however, there are countless discourse communities worldwide that can be perceived. Swales also analyzes a speech community, and how a discourse community and speech community are two

Genre two I thought going into the project would be the easiest however it ended up being the genre I feel I did the worst on. I struggled with presenting to the class, I felt as if I rushed my self and did not speak clearly enough. Looking back I wished I had done another form of presentation such as a video or a webpage like Hannah and Holly had created. When I was creating my power point I debated writing out what I was going to say onto the slides, however when I practiced presenting to my roommates, I spoke more clearly and calmly while going from my memory. However, when I got to class I felt uncomfortable standing in front of the whole class as well as the camera and found how nervous I was effected my presentation. This affected my organization of my presentation. I found myself more focused on my nerves than what I was going to say.

Overall, I really enjoyed this course because it connected history, a topic I love, with current events. I loved being able to turn on the news and be able to follow the political discourse because of topics I learned in class. Whether is was an action Trump took that violated Supreme Court cases, or the debate over appointments by Trump, I was able to follow the news easily because of this class. Additionally, I was very excited when we would mention current event in class because I could easily see the connections. For example was excited to re-watch the RNC and DNC because I look back with a more critical eye behind the electoral process. Due to the interesting topic in this class, I am considering continuing my study of government into