Blog #5: Discourse Community

I needed a picture so here's something I took this summer :D

All those JSTOR and Op-Eds, I forgot we did blogs. Thank goodness too cause blogging is so much easier than trying to meme a JSTOR article.

Professor Flewelling called Swales' piece a "stiff" read, so I wasn't looking forward to try and get through it. I probably had to read every sentence over a few times and still not really understand it but thats okay cause we talked about discourse communities in class on Monday.

From my understanding based on class on Monday, a discourse community is more than just in the intended audience. It is more of a specific group of people who have developed their own way of communicating in order to achieve a common goal. I liked Professor's analogy she always uses about doctors. Doctors taking and then sharing their SOAP notes could be considered a discourse community. A discourse community could be a social group such as my group of friends, or it could be a professional group such as how I would communicate with my coworkers and managers at work.

Swale came up with six characteristics to help identify a group as a discourse community:

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." 

The group I am going to analyze is my coworkers and managers. On any given day at work I will communicate on the phone, over text, written daily logs, verbally in person, and verbally with a radio. We meet the first criteria, being we are all trying to the job done (i.e. make sure everything is ready/clean) As for the second criteria, I'm not entirely sure what "mechanisms of intercommunication" means but I taking it as multiple forms of communication which we also have at my work. I communicate with coworkers at work "primarily to provide information and feedback." The fourth characteristic Swale give is a mouthful wow. I think this one is similar to #3, saying a discourse community has to have different styles/forms of communicating. Swale calls "lexis" as "community-specific abbreviations and acronyms." At my job we abbreviate all the time to communicate in a quicker way. We also have a very formal technical way of communication with our radios. As for the last characteristic, we are always loosing and getting new people so we always have a balance of experts and novices who are familiar with how communicating at work is done. Based on these characteristic, I do believe my coworkers and I are apart of our own discourse community.