Discourse Communities

DISCOURSE COMMUNITIES! Woo. The party don’t start til discourse communities are brought in

(If you couldn’t tell, this is a very, very pained smile.)

Hey, its been a while since we’ve written a blog. I would say its good to be back but that would be a lie because I didn’t really miss it all that much. I never know what to write, especially when the topics are about genre or discourse communities. And it was even harder when I saw the article the blog was based on. I tried reading Swales but it was so hard to even pay attention. Did anyone else have a hard time reading this or was it just me? The first attempt at me reading it was basically just me making this face the entire time.

The sentences were so long and boring my mind started to drift from what he was actually talking about. Why do academic authors like this always feel the need to fluff up sentences to the point where I get lost and don’t even remember what the point is? Can’t they just get straight to the point? But after realizing I had no choice, I forced myself to read. And after reading the same paragraphs about 10 times, I guess I finally started to get what he was trying to say. Swales begins the article by introducing speech community; a community that shares the knowledge of rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech. Swales then talks about how a speech community is built through birth, accident, or adoption and then contrasts  this idea by introducing discourse community, which he says uses persuasion and training to recruit members.

He introduces the idea of discourse community by using six characteristics that each discourse community holds. The six characteristics he included are: 1) a discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. 2) A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. 3) A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. 4) A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. 5) In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis. 6) A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.

So the characteristics themselves are pretty self explanatory. But I’m gonna explain them anyways so I have more to talk about lol So, a discourse community have common goals, okay cool that’s number 1. Number 2, a discourse community has ways to communicate between the people who are part of it. Number 3, a discourse community uses its many ways of communication to provide information to its members. Number 4, a discourse community has many different genres tied to it. Number 5, a discourse community has specific language. And number 6, a discourse community has different levels of membership. Did anyone notice in the article that it says “individuals enter as apprentices and leave by death or in other less involuntary ways”? Leave by death? Kinda intense for  something like a discourse community haha but anyways, simplifying Swales characteristics helped me understand the concept of discourse communities a lot better. Hopefully my explanations helped anyone else struggling with this article!

I guess the best way to fully understand discourse communities to analyze one that I’m actually part of; College students. Our goal is basically just to pass all our classes with decent grades and hopefully graduate within 4 or 5 years. And also try not to cry too much about hard adulating is.  Or how much sleep we didn’t get. Or how much money we wish we had. Where was this going again? Oh yeah, discourse community. We also communicate through a bunch of different ways, whether its through class, social media, or any clubs we may be affiliated with. Talk about how much we hate waking up for 8ams or how certain exams make us feel like we dishonored our families is frequent. We provide information by sharing different information about classes we may have taken together or have taken before. We share thoughts on places like ratemyprofessor or facebook groups. Our language differs between specific groups, but they usually consist of slang and inappropriate language. As college students we have different “thresholds” through the number of years we’ve been here. We could be freshman, or we could be seniors.

Has this reached 750 words yet? Yes? Okay cool because I’m done. Til next time!