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
The heuristic that is used for this research guide to identify a discourse communities is the six characteristics that John Swales identifies in “The
There are a wide array of genres, including n Each genre has a specific goal and style of writing. The Smart Therapist: A Look to the Future of Smartphones and mHealth Technologies in Psychotherapy by Bonnie A. Clough and Leanne M. Casey falls into the professional genre. This article focuses on how smartphones can help mental health and what the future of the industry looks like. Many genres exist that hold the truth and main goal is to entertain or inform readers, all genres have four major characteristics: a specific rhetorical purpose, content, structure, and linguistic features.
Many examples of discourse community can be seen when you consider music. Every artist has two sets of fan bases; the first are the “band wagon” fans, these are people who only like the artist when they are what society considers main stream. The second type of fans are the loyal fans, most who have listened to the artist since they have started singing/rapping. These loyal fans are the groups who make up discourse communities. These communities are important because they are the structure of an artist career, without these loyal fans, artist aren’t able to grow.
A discourse community is a group of people involved in and communicating about a particular topic, issue, or in a particular field. According to the criteria conveyed in “The Concept of Discourse Community” by John Swales, Christianity can be considered as a discourse community because of its common goals, medium of communication, participatory mechanisms, specific genres, and its threshold level of members.
James T Porter describes a discourse community as a group who “Shares assumptions and what objects are appropriate for examination and discussion”, in other words; a group of people who are in some way or form connected. So, take engineers for example where every member pays the same price for entry, an engineering degree. This would mean that from day one every member is indoctrinated with the same way of thinking and share a common knowledge at the core of their education. The shared goals of the community are to design, develop and create new feats of engineering in their respective fields. In order for engineers to accomplish their goals, they need to work together and communicate. But, how exactly does an engineer communicate if they are
For the purposes of this paper, I will be using the criteria that were outlined by John Swales for what classifies as a Discourse Community. Swales said that for a community of individuals to be considered a Discourse Community if must meet six basic requirements. These requirements are that "there are common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genres, a highly specialized terminology and a high general level of expertise" (Swales 224). We will explore these requirements further as we look into whether Reddit fits them or
To be a part of a discourse community, one must be credible, possess factual knowledge and draw on the values of its members to be accepted into the community. At the same time, a person must learn typical ways people in that community communicate and argue. They share a certain genre—type of writing. Members of discourse communities provide information and feedback that are imperative in order for that discourse community to grow. In the following paper, I will discuss three discourse communities and a genre that they typically use: people who read Nutritional Facts religiously, college students, and industrial organizational psychologists.
A discourse community is a social collective that shares ideas, goals, values, and themes. Discourse communities existed in all facets of life, and are important to each individual’s social life. We all belong to varies discourse communities. The people you hang out with, the social networks you belong to, and even your favorite sports teams are discourse communities. Today we will look at a specific one; we will look at the discourse community of Mixed Martial Arts.
Communities may be a home away from home for some members with their own terminology and varying degrees of formality. These groups are usually joined by people for different reasons, some ranging from socializing to the acquisition of a single dream the group shares. Some groups even have members who are either expert in their communities focus or are members who are eager and ready to learn. For some of these communities, this form of communication and other factors is what defines them as a discourse community. However, there are communities that share some trait of discourse communities yet they themselves are not. Due to these strict rules about what can and cannot be a discourse community can be hard to discern. Like, for instance, the
A discourse community is defined as a group of people involved in and communicating about a particular topic, issue, or in a particular field. We all belong to multiple discourse communities.To earn a position of a discourse community one must possess accurate knowledge, establish reliability of members to be accepted and learn to persuade other members of the community. The discourse community that I identify with personally and the profession I plan to pursue is the world of film production. However, there are many jobs that need to be done on a film set leading to there being multiple discourse communities within the film industry, what I want to focus on specifically is the DP, otherwise known as the “director of photography”. According to “The Concept of Discourse Community,” by educator and researcher John Swales, a discourse community is defined by six characteristics.
As part of daily life, we communicate and connect ourselves with certain communities. School, jobs, families, sports, extracurricular activities, and many other communities are just a few we come into contact with. Although these may seem to appear the same, there are specific types of communities such as a discourse community. A discourse community is a group of people involved in and communicating about a particular topic, issue, or in a particular field (Webcourses, N.d, Website) that has a share a common set of goals and attempt to achieve these goals (Swales, 1990). According to researcher and educator, John Swales, there are six characteristics that define whether or not a community is considered a discourse community. Following the criteria Swales states is necessary to be a discourse community, I did an in depth research on the American Sign Language community. Through my study, I was able to meet all six characteristics.
Since the dawn of time that humans have reigned around the world, they have formed groups or communities that share common goals or interest. John Swales (1990), a respectable professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan, developed a list of characteristics to determine communities or, as he calls it, a discourse community. He identifies these characteristics as all the discourse communities has agreed upon common goals, mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, provide information and feedback, possess one or more genres of communication, distinguish vocabulary or lexis, and requirement for memberships (Swales, 1990, p. 1-5). The International Game Developers Association (IGDA), falls into the category as a discourse community. Founded in 1994, IGDA is a non-profit professional association that collaborates with projects that encompasses members from all fields of game development. They bring together developers to improve their lives and prepare the next generation of developers. The IGDA is a professional discourse community that defines all of Swales characteristic to be considered as a discourse community.
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.
I decided to research this specific community, because I find it interesting when people take shows so serious that they decide to take action as if it is really going to happen. John Swales defines a discourse community as a, “group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals.” Swales then goes on to explain six characteristics that a credible discourse community must uphold. The six characteristics include: common goals, participatory mechanisms,
Life is like a massive highway that have infinite routes anyone can choose take to reach some type of designated goal. Those various routes lead to distinct exits, where one can discover a group or groups that share similarities dealing with viewpoints, beliefs, or understanding towards a particular goal. These groups can be identified as discourse communities. According to, “The Concept of Discourse Community,” in the textbook, Writing About Writing, John Swales stressed that in order to be classified as a discourse community the group has to have all six defining characteristics. Swales emphasized, “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals, mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, utilities and hence processes one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, acquires specific lexis, and has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discourse expertise” (Swales, 221-222). Keeping this key detail in mind, there is numerous type of discourse out there.