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John Swales Discourse Community Examples

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A discourse community is defined as groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals. John Swales is a professor in linguistics and received his Ph. D. from Cambridge University. John Swales’s Six Criteria is a perfect setup for a discourse community, and some of the steps are setting a common goal, mechanisms of intercommunication; provide information and feedback, genres, lexis, and threshold level of members. James Lee is a professor who taught linguistics at Stanford and Northwestern University. Gee’s idea of a discourse community is a secondary dominant or non-dominant which applies to their life outside of work. I thought police officers would make a great example of a discourse community because of the …show more content…

Gee says “a number of other terms crop up as well in his work: dominant and nondominant Discourses, primary and secondary Discourses, literacy, apprenticeship, metaknowledge, and mushfake, among others.”(Gee 481) Police officers fall under the secondary and primary discourse community because of the job that they do. If a crime happens in front of a police officer he has the right to arrest him if he is not on duty at that time. Some officers feel obligated to do this while off duty, but others could look the other way. They have a metaknowledge that others don’t, so they would be more prepared in a certain situation of violence or …show more content…

I asked Hilgenbrink, What types of feedback and information do you have to give to the community or police headquarters? He said “First off we have to write citations to enforce the law and then we have to talk to our supervisor about any laws that could be removed. Citations involve a lot of paperwork and this is one my least favorite things to do.” They have to give parking, speeding, and all other type of fines to bring revenue into the city and to enforce the law. These citations consist of two pages of content pertaining to the law that an individual has broken. If the community has a problem with a law they can discuss it with the city council or it can be discussed at town hall meetings.
“Genres are types of texts that are recognizable to the reader and writers, and meet the needs of the rhetorical situation in which they function.”(Swales 467) I asked Hilgenbrink, What texts or books do police officers use every day? He said “I think the text or book that we use every day is the laws that we enforce.” This is pretty simple because the laws are stated in the state’s constitution which the police officers inforce. Genre is crucial to the development of a discourse

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