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Swales Journal

Summary


Swales, John M. "The Concept of Discourse Community."

In his excerpt about “discourse communities”, John Swales explains common misconceptions about the term and his view on its true definition. He addresses the fact that there seem to be some misconceptions about what a discourse community is. Many people think of discourse communities as speech communities, when really they are much broader than that. They apply more toward written language, genres, context, and lexis. One difference Swales points out to assist in telling speech communities and discourse communities apart is that, in a speech community, the members are born into it or adopted into it (Swales 24). In contrast, members of discourse communities are recruited and trained or persuaded based on their “specific interest” in the group (24). Swales then goes into a list of characteristics specific to discourse groups to help identify them. For one the community must have public goals. They also must have a means of communicating to the members, no matter how diverse or spread apart they may be. These means of communication are for gathering information and providing feedback. Discourse groups also use at least one genre and they develop a specific lexis for the community. There is also a wide range of members possessing differing degrres of knowledge about the group and membership varies from novice to experts (24-27).

Analysis

 


I found this article to be very informative and helpful in understanding the idea of discourse community. I did however find it rather difficult to follow for the first and last couple pages. But the article did get me thinking about what discourse communities I might be involved in. Now like I said, I found the article a little difficult to follow, but I think I am in a few. My church, or at least my denomination as a whole, one could probably be considered to have a discourse community. Everyone that is Catholic across the globe knows how to read scriptures, the context, the abbreviations, and so forth.  It is a pretty universally similar group when you look at how they communicate. Another discourse community I am involved in is with my local animal shelter that I volunteer at. The SPCA is a universal group, so there are a range of members, all with similar knowledge of the group that outsiders might not know. These are at least the groups that I think come closest to what Swales describes.  In the future I hope to be a graphic designer for Disney so maybe I will become part of a discourse community through that.  After reading, I understand why it is important to explain the definition of discourse community. There seems a very fine line separating it from a speech community and it could be difficult to distinguish the two. There is a good chance I have not even categorized my groups correctly.

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