Blog #5: Defining a Discourse Community

What is up homies? 

Tartar sauce. We back in this thang. It's been a while since I wrote one of these little blog thingies, so I'm just gonna let you know, right now, that this will be the greatest thing you will skim through. Kidding. 

Mr. John Swales

So let's just get to the really good stuff. A discourse community. It just screams excitement, doesn't it? No one really knows what a discourse community is or what it means, but I'm gonna take this entire blog to try and figure it out. John Swales is a professor and linguist who wrote a book called Genre Analysis. Cool right?! Woah settle down, don't get too excited! Swales dabbles in awesome things like language patterns and working with nonnative English speakers. 

According to Swales, there are 6 main characteristics that distinguish a discourse community. A discourse community is NOT a friend group, audience, or speech community. It's something else. Give me a few seconds while I come up with a good way of explaining this. A discourse community is "a group of people with a set of common goals, language, and interests" (Nordquist). I obviously couldn't figure out a good enough way to explain this. I'll just list the 6 characteristics in my own words. 

1. Set of common goals
2. Different way of intercommunication 
3. The members within the community engage in 2-way communication 
4. Uses one or more genres to reach goals
5. Genres and words specific for interaction within the community 
6. Some members maintain a level of expertise

All of these characteristics require language and writing to be specific to that particular community. Everyone within the discourse community has an understanding of all 6 of Swales' characteristics without even knowing. 

While I was reading this, I automatically thought of my fraternity. Yes, we do the same things as all the other sororities, but it is a fraternity. (Side note: My organization was based on the male fraternities of that time and was created before the term "sorority" was invented.) I'm not just saying that to be annoying, even if it may be. That would basically be like saying Coke is the same as Pepsi when it's not. If they were the same thing, they would be called the same thing. 

Back to what I was saying. Being in Pi Beta Phi puts me in a discourse community that may be similar to other greek organizations, but is specific to my fraternity. 

1. We share a set of common goals that include raising money for our philanthropy, creating lifelong friendships, and growing personally and intellectually
2. Intercommunication occurs in group chats, Facebook, and weekly chapter meetings
3. 2-way communication allows information to get to all members in the house
4. Different genres used include Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram
5. Specific terms used within the community include mottos TO*T and P*L
6. Members of expertise are executive board, other boards and committees, and initiated members 

Because all 6 of Swales’characteristics are fulfilled with my fraternity, I believe that it could definitely be considered a discourse community. We all have common goals and use the same mechanisms for the communicating with each other. We have our own lexis that we use to refer to different things. Only people within the organization or have been a part of it would know what is being talked about.

It is interesting that you can be in many different discourse communities and be completely unaware of it. While the Swales excerpt may have been drier than California's drought, I did learn a little about the importance of knowing that discourse communities play an important role in each and everyone of our lives. I still have a hard time defining where else a discourse community is in my life. I feel like I would have to go through an extensive amount of looking into the background of the community to fully decide whether or not it is actually a discourse community. I feel like because there is such a broad definition certain communities could be considered discourse communities based on the situation.

I wish I could have explained it better, but the idea of a discourse community is still something that my brain has to process. Swales obviously knows what he’s talking about, so if you need some clarification, which you might, please refer to his excerpt. 

NORDQUIST: http://grammar.about.com/od/d/g/Discourse-Community.htm