discourse community essay pdf

Readings on Writing

Understanding Discourse Communities

Chapter description.

This chapter uses John Swales’ definition of discourse community to explain to students why this concept is important for college writing and beyond. The chapter explains how genres operate within discourse communities, why different discourse communities have different expectations for writing, and how to understand what qualifies as a discourse community. The article relates the concept of discourse community to a personal example from the author (an acoustic guitar jam group) and an example of the academic discipline of history. The article takes a critical stance regarding the concept of discourse community, discussing both the benefits and constraints of communicating within discourse communities. The article concludes with writerly questions students can ask themselves as they enter new discourse communities in order to be more effective communicators.

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15 Discourse and Discourse Community

Christian J. Pulver

The term discourse community combines two key concepts— community and discourse .

Generally speaking, community refers to the local groups we live and work with, our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. While living in proximity with other people is an important aspect of community, other aspects beyond location play an important role. Those aspects have to do with our shared ways of using language and the common values and beliefs that emerge from how we communicate with each other. Such shared language practices are called discourse , and people who share similar ways of talking and thinking, and do it frequently together, are part of a discourse community .

Conventionally, we can think of discourse as the exchange of words and ideas among those who share a common purpose for continually interacting. We discourse about the weather, last night’s game, politics, and art. Discourse is like conversation, but conversation is just one way that discourse is exchanged within the larger language and communication patterns that we engage in, from our local discourse communities to the larger public. Discourse is also shared through written texts, videos, podcasts, and other discursive genres. So, not only does our proximity to each other shape the communities we are a part of, discourse communities also share particular genres, styles, and accepted ways of communicating with each other, and they tend to gravitate around particular problems that are of shared concern.

Though the word community is often thought of as people who get along well, not all discourse communities get along, and members don’t always like each other. That is to say, discourse communities come in all shapes in sizes, and the language practices that occur within them can vary widely as a result. Some discourse communities can be confrontational or argumentative (legal discourse, for example), and others might be more intimate and caring (parent-child discourse, for example). And discourse communities don’t exist in a bubble—they are embedded in the larger public and cultural discourses that include entertainment, national politics, and public debates that circulate broadly via mass and social media. The discourse communities we are part of at work or in college, with family and friends, are always embedded in these larger discourses.

Understanding the shape of a discourse and the problems that matter to a discourse community are vital to understanding the nature of the particular problem you are considering and how to solve it. To achieve this kind of understanding, it is always useful to map out the basic contours of the discourse by looking at the where, when, what, who, how, and, why of that discourse.

Mapping the Discourse of a Problem or Controversy

Mapping a discourse in these ways is an ongoing activity that will help you develop a richer, broader understanding of the problem you are exploring. Not only will it help you understand the nature and nuances of the problem, it will help you understand how to enter the conversation and contribute towards its solution (what is known as discourse competence) .

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• DiscourseCommunityTable © Christian Pulver is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike) license

Thinking Rhetorically: Writing for Professional and Public Audiences Copyright © 2020 by Christian J. Pulver is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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English Composition 2089: Researching Discourse

• Get Help Here!
• Introduction

Discourse Community Analysis/Ethnography

• Analyzing Multiple Discourses
• Research Refresher--Finding articles, books, and more!
• How Do I Find Different Genres?
• How Do I Find Images and Media?
• Popular Music Criticism
• Citing Your Sources
• Recast Content in a Different Genre

If your assignment focuses on a single discourse community, please watch the video below. It will provide an explanation of the focus of this assignment, tips on finding sources, and suggestions on analyzing the  sources you find.

Clickable bookmarks to take you to the "chapters" of this video (total duration: 15 min. 56 sec.)

Introduction (27 sec.)

Purpose of a discourse community analysis (34 sec.)

Choosing a discourse community (3 min. 5 sec.)

The focus of your analysis (1 min. 18 sec.)

Finding your sources: brainstorming (41 sec.)

Finding primary texts (1 min. 57 sec.)

Professional websites (1 min. 46 sec.)

Social media sites (1 min. 10 sec.)

Primary research (50 sec.)

Secondary research (41 sec.)

Working with your sources (1 min. 12 sec.)

Putting it all together (59 sec.)

Helpful resources (1 min. 16 sec.)

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• Next: Analyzing Multiple Discourses >>
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Composition Forum 37, Fall 2017 http://compositionforum.com/issue/37/

The Concept of Discourse Community: Some Recent Personal History

John M. Swales

I thought I had finished with the concept when I completed the Other Floors, Other Voices book (1988, Lawrence Erlbaum), and now being republished by the University of Michigan Press. There I had expanded and modified the criteria for “place discourse communities”. However, in 2013 I was asked to give a talk to the English department at Wake Forest University and the suggested topic was the concept of discourse community. Although I was a bit surprised that this old warhorse was being brought back for active duty, I agreed. When I started to look at what websites like Wikipedia and search engines like Google Scholar could produce on the subject, it became clear that the concept had had a resurgence because of the wide adoption of the Wardle & Downs textbook, Writing about Writing , and its inclusion of part of the discourse community section from Genre Analysis . In fact, that section of Genre Analysis had been written in the late 1980s, or nearly 30 years ago, and yet there were those six old criteria apparently having a remarkably extended shelf-life. So, I prepared a talk for Wake Forest, attempting to update the concept. Then, in 2015, Monique Memet, the editor of a bilingual journal called ASp , the official organ of the French association for English for academic and professional purposes, asked me to write an article on the topic for her journal. So, I essentially wrote up the Wake Forest slides, and that is what you will find below, reprinted with the permission of the editorial board of ASp .

Reflections on the Concept of Discourse Community Le Concept de Communauté de Discours: Quelques Réflexions

This article reflects upon my thirty-year intermittent involvement with the concept of discourse community. It opens with a personal history of that involvement, focusing on a study of the communities in a single, small university building. It then moves to the way the concept has become co-opted by those who teach university-level writing in the United States. Then, three types of discourse community are introduced: local, focal, and “folocal”, this last having characteristics of the first two. Active academics are typically members of “folocal” communities, as they attempt to balance the demands of their local situation (teaching, administration) and the demands of active scholarship (presenting, publishing). In the second half of the paper, the original criteria as given in Genre Analysis (1990) are modified, extended, and brought more up to date, followed by some concluding observations.

Cet article présente une réflexion sur le concept de communauté de discours, dont, en tant que chercheur, je me préoccupe de manière épisodique depuis trente ans. Il retrace tout d’abord le point de départ de mon intérêt personnel pour cette notion, en rappelant les résultats d’une étude qui portait sur des communautés au sein d’un petit bâtiment universitaire. Il explore ensuite la façon dont ce concept a été repris par ceux qui enseignent les techniques d’écriture universitaire dans le supérieur aux États-Unis. Trois types de communauté de discours sont ensuite proposés : les communautés locales, focales et « folocales », ces dernières présentant des caractéristiques communes aux deux premières. Les universitaires particulièrement actifs appartiennent typiquement aux communautés « folocales » car ils s’efforcent de maintenir un équilibre entre les exigences qui émanent du contexte local (enseignement, tâches administratives) et celles qui sont liées à la production savante intensive (communications, publications). Dans la seconde partie de l’article, les critères dans Genre Analysis (1990) sont amendés, étoffés et mis à jour, puis sont suivis de remarques conclusives.

I first heard the term “discourse community” early in 1986, fairly soon after I had moved to the United States; it was used in a talk at the University of Michigan given by Lillian Bridwell-Bowles. I cannot remember much of the talk at today’s distance, but I do remember how I immediately recognized that the concept of discourse community was precisely the concept I had been looking for since it would provide socio-rhetorical context for my ongoing exploration of (mainly) academic genres. By the time Genre Analysis was eventually published in 1990, discourse community (DC) had become a member of a trio of interlocking concepts, the other two being genre and language-learning task (Swales 1990; Flowerdew 2015). For most of the next few years, I did not pay much attention to the concept, but I did keep mentioning to my doctoral students that the strange configuration of units in the small building where I had my office would make a splendid dissertation research site. This was because the North University Building (now demolished) had the university’s Computer Center on the first floor, the university’s Herbarium (its large collection of dried plants) on the second floor, while above it was the English Language Institute (ELI), divided into a teaching section and a testing section, and missioned to provide courses and services for international students on the large Ann Arbor campus. However, I was unable to persuade any of the students to take it on, so around 1995 I decided I would do the study myself. The basic idea was to see whether we had three different coherent and cohering discourse communities, each on its own floor in the same building. The book appeared in 1998 with the title of Other Floors, Other Voices: A Textography of a Small University Building (Swales 1998). I described the study as a “textography” to indicate that it was something more than a discourse analysis but something less than a full-blown ethnography.

One of the many things that I did learn in the investigative process was that university clocks move at different speeds in different parts of a university. The clock goes very slowly in the Herbarium. If a botanist wants to borrow some specimens from Michigan, he or she needs to agree to keep them for at least two years, and may actually keep them for decades. The reference books that the systematic botanists employ for keying out the plants they are studying have a shelf-life for decades. One major project, to describe all the plants of western Mexico, began in 1946 and was still continuing up to a few years ago. In the ELI, the shelf-life of its products, typically textbooks and tests, runs some 5–10 years or so before they are revised or replaced. While in the Computer Center, the shelf-life of computer manuals, etc., is often just a matter of months before an update appears or some patch is incorporated. Another discovery was that the botanists utilized a very different set of scholarly genres from those to which I had become accustomed; they were, in increasing order of importance or status, a “treatment” (a description of a selected group of plants), a “flora” (the description of all the plants in some region), and a “monograph” (a study of all the plants in one family, wherever they are found). Toward the end of the volume, I concluded that the denizens of the Herbarium formed a very distinct discourse community, while the ELI had many of the elements of a DC, even though there was a rather different ethos in the teaching and testing divisions (over such matters as to what “counts” as a publication), which remained a source of strain. On the other hand, in the Computer Center, the part-time employment of ever-changing streams of short-stay students meant that any sense of community, a sense that “we are all more or less on the same page”, never really developed.

From then on, my thoughts about discourse communities lay largely dormant until in 2013 I was asked to give a talk at a well-known university in North Carolina. The professor who invited me suggested I speak about “the concept of discourse community”, which I agreed to do. So I started to look around in order to bring myself up to date. My first surprise was that the old material in Genre Analysis seemed to be very much alive and well. The Wikipedia entry, for example, opens with this two-sentence paragraph:

A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about their goals. Linguist John Swales defined discourse communities as “groups that have goals and purposes, and use communication to achieve their goals.” {1}

Further, in the middle of this first page, we find:

Swales presents six defining characteristics: A discourse community: 1) has a broadly agreed set of common public goals; 2) has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members; 3) uses its participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback; 4) utilizes and possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims; 5) In addition to owning genres, it has acquired some specific lexis; 6) has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise {2}

If one scrolls down the Google entries for discourse community, it seems about a quarter consists of extracts from published or presented work, such as Beaufort (1998), Borg (2003), and Johns (1997). Another quarter consists of entries from encyclopedia-type websites such as Researchomatic and the NCTE briefs . Most of the rest are either posts from instructors expounding the concept for their composition students, or blogs from those students, summarizing and applying the six criteria to their own experiences. One surprising aspect of these posts and blogs was that there were very few criticisms of or objections to the six criteria, one of the very few coming from a student named Jordan Rosa: “Questions I still have: Are these the only characteristics of a discourse community, or are there more? How many more?” Good for you, Jordan!

I soon discovered that the main reason for this flurry of activity in using the six old criteria derived from an extensive DC extract from Genre Analysis in Wardle and Downs’ highly successful composition textbook Writing about writing: A college reader (Wardle & Downs 2011). Here is a PowerPoint slide from one of the more interesting instructor uptakes by Heather Wayne, at that time a teaching assistant in English at the University of Central Florida. (I have added some explanatory notes in parentheses):

Using the 6 criteria, are these discourse communities? 1) A soccer team 2) A sorority/fraternity 3) UCF (University of Central Florida) 4) Publix employees (Publix is a supermarket chain in southeastern USA) 5) The Hong Kong Study Circle (a postal history group examined in Genre Analysis) 6) Republican voters 7) College Democrats at UCF 8) Composition scholars 9) Occupants of Nike dorms (a student resident hall) 10) Our class {3}

Not unexpectedly, I have been in somewhat of two minds about all this attention to the six defining criteria for a discourse community. (And I notice in passing that Wikipedia uses the present tense (“Swales presents”) for something written twenty-five years ago.). On the one hand, there has been a sense of (doubtless vainglorious) gratification that something I had dreamed up in the late 1980s was still alive and well, while, on the other, there has been a feeling of dismay at the inertia—at the unthinking acceptance of something that was written before most of today’s undergraduates were born and at a time before globalization, before all of those advances in computers and computer-based communications, and particularly before the emergence of social media.

The basic idea of a rhetorical discourse community arose in contrast to the longer-standing sociolinguistic concept of speech community. The latter was premised on a homogeneous assemblage of people who share place, background, language variety and who largely share social, religious, and cultural values. Such communities tend to be small and isolated, such as those existing in mountain villages, or on small islands, or in desert oases. In some contrast, the former is a largely heterogeneous, socio-rhetorical assemblage of people who broadly share occupational or recreational experiences, goals, and interests. Thus, members of a DC may have different first languages, different religions, and belong to diverse ethnicities. Examples might include members of GERAS or of TESOL, all those who work in an animal clinic, or those who are members of a local choir.

However, it is unclear whether, in this era of cell-phones, family dispersion, a fluid and uncertain job market for the young, the rise of international trade, and the decline of local crafts and industries, traditional speech communities continue to exist in meaningful numbers. In addition, discourse communities both influence and are influenced by the larger communities within which they are situated. In consequence, when a university becomes established in a town, the presence of this constellation of discourse communities influences the wider urban environment; as a result, the urban environment provides services that are helpful to the university, such as cheap student housing, cheap restaurants, museums, and more bookshops, which in turn further consolidates our sense of a university town like Cambridge, Heidelberg, or Uppsala. And the same shaping forces create other kinds of town: religious ones like Lourdes, Assisi, or Mecca; sporting towns like Le Mans, St. Andrews, or Saratoga; or government towns like Washington, Ottawa, or Canberra. In other words, both concepts have developed fuzzier boundaries as the world has changed.

A second set of problems is that the concept of discourse community as originally conceived was overly static. While this perhaps did not matter so much in 1990, in today’s more unsettled and uncertain world, it looms larger as a problem; in particular, the concept did not firmly or directly address how people either join or leave DCs. For this, it is helpful to turn to Lave and Wenger’s “Community of practice” concept (Lave & Wenger 1991), in which they explain the processes of entry, apprenticeship, membership, seniority, and exit through retirement, death, translocation, etc. A third problematic area is that both the discourse community concept and that of communities of practice tend to view their objects of study through an overly idealistic lens, especially in terms of assumptions about shared beliefs, values, motives, and allegiances among its members (Harris 1989). For instance, when we visit a department in the university that is new to us, our immediate impression is typically one of a homogeneous and sedate disciplinary world with wide agreements about such matters as methodology and epistemology. However, the more we get to know it, the more it seems to be fragmented and compartmentalized, and perhaps even fractious and adversative (Tannen 1998). To an outsider, a linguistics department, for instance, might seem to represent a collectivity of folks with a like-minded interest in language. However, to an insider, there are clear differences between a phonetician and a phonologist, or between those who pursue the relationship between language and mind, and those who pursue the relationship between language and society. Sometimes, of course, difference leads to fracture. As in a number of universities, the biology department at Michigan has split into two, one dealing with micro- and molecular biology and the other dealing with ecology and evolution. As a senior biologist said to me at the time of the split, “We biologists are either skin-in or skin-out”. Finally, like many in major U.S. universities, I used to have a split appointment: 50% of effort in the Department of Linguistics and 50% in the English Language Institute. I suspect I was always a little too practical and pragmatic for my mostly theoretical linguistics colleagues, while a little too research-minded for my fellow EAP instructors in the ELI.

The term discourse community is now more than thirty years old since it was apparently first coined by Martin Nystrand, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Nystrand 1982). Since then, it has been widely used and discussed (sometimes critically) by scholars in applied language studies as a way of recognizing that communications largely operate within conventions and expectations established by communities of various kinds. As this interest in the concept has proliferated, we have come to see that these communities are, in fact, differentiated by various factors, such as how localized they are, what origins they have had, and what types of activity are central to their existence. So, it is the main purpose of this section to offer a categorization of different types of discourse community; if you will, to draw an outline map of the discourse community territory.

There are essentially three sub-types of these: residential, vocational, and occupational, but only the last of these really applies to the university context. These are groupings of people who all work at the same place (as in a factory or a university department), or at the same occupation in the same area (all the bakers in a town). These DCs have acquired many abbreviations and acronyms as well as some special words and phrases that are needed in order to get their jobs done more quickly and more efficiently—terminologies that are not used, nor even often understood, by the general public. For example, when I worked in Aston University, one of the main eating places on campus was the Vauxhall Dining Centre. So, when we had visitors, if I were not careful, I would say some form of “Let’s go to the VD Centre for lunch”. When I saw consternation on their faces, I would hurriedly have to explain that I was not suggesting eating at the clinic for venereal diseases!

I am, of course, familiar with my local discourse community in Michigan’s ELI. I know when the building is unlocked and how to gain access when it is locked, where the toilets are, and who to ask for technical help. I know which codes to use for the photocopier, and where to find certain office supplies, and so on. However, when I travel to another university for a conference, I do not know any of these things and, unless the signage is excellent, I will probably soon get lost. Lower-level university staff typically belong to just their local departmental discourse community, while mid-level staff may belong in addition to the communities of, for instance, departmental budget officers, who get together for regular meetings and discussions. High-level administrators probably belong to some professional association and travel to that association’s national convention. Members of these DCs also have acquired expectations and conventions of behavior that orchestrate their working days. One further consequence is that implicit value systems emerge which determine what is seen as good and less good work. Further, members of these DCs may get together socially outside of work, which further reinforces the community. Often, in these communities, there are apprentice arrangements (such as probationary periods) whereby new members are scrutinized as they attempt to acculturate into accepted occupational behaviors.

Focal communities are the opposite in many ways of local ones. They are typically associations of some kind that reach across a region, a nation, and internationally. They may be informal groupings or more formal ones with rules, elections and paid memberships. One informal group that I belong to is Southeast Michigan Birders, and this is part of an email message I received recently:

At about 3 p.m. yesterday three owls flew over Wisner Hwy. As they flew closer to the road they swooped lower and disappeared into the woods. Because of the open fields and time of day I suspected SEO, but thought probably not because I have never associated SEO with an affinity for landing in woods.

I suspect that I may be the only person reading this journal who would know that SEO is the standard U.S. acronym for Short-eared Owl. Indeed, many types of discourse communities develop shorthand expressions, such as abbreviations and acronyms, to aid speed of communication. Members of such groups can be of different nationalities, ages, and occupations, and can differ quite considerably in their economic circumstances and educational backgrounds. They come together because of a focus on their hobby or recreational preference. Today, these kinds of DC are much aided by modern conveniences such as email and the cell phone. In some cases, they may produce a newsletter or have some other kind of publication that is distributed among the members.

The other major kind of focal discourse community is professional rather than recreational . In many professions, there has emerged over the years a national association that is designed to bind the members together and advance the profession in terms of protecting its rights and using its specialized expertise to lobby against what it views as ill-considered policies and in favor of those that it believes to be more soundly based. GERAS and BAAL (the British Association of Applied Linguists) would be typical examples. Many of these associations have a national conference, whereby individuals from far-flung places gather together to learn of latest developments, review the latest products in exhibition areas, and listen to luminaries in their field. These days, they typically have very active websites, wherein members can receive updates and express their opinions and preferences. If they are academically inclined, these associations often also support one or more journals for their members, such as ASp or TESOL Quarterly .

The third and final main type of discourse community has characteristics of both local and focal DCs, which is why I have coined the fused term “folocal” as a neologistic amalgam of the “local” and “focal”. These are hybrid communities whose members have a double—and sometimes split—allegiance, as they are confronted by internal and external challenges and pressures. Consider the situation of the local branch of your bank, or a car dealership in your area. The people who work in such places have both their own ways of going about their tasks, and their own conventionalized ways of talking about those tasks and with their customers. However, they also are in contact and receive instructions from regional or national offices that in part determine how they carry out their duties. In effect, they are subjected to both centripetal and centrifugal forces.

Perhaps a clearer instance is that of a university department in a research-active university. Members of such departments are members of both a local DC and a focal one. They understand how things operate in their own institution as they go about their teaching and administrative activities. Unlike outsiders, they know when rooms and buildings are locked, and where and to whom to make an application for some small amount of money. But they are also specialized scholars whose closest colleagues are likely to be elsewhere, perhaps even in other countries, and whose activities involve presenting at conferences in other places and publishing in distant journals. As is well known, there often emerges a conflict between the local demands on their time and the focal demands on that time—a conflict that is presumably becoming exacerbated as more and more higher education institutions are pressuring their faculty to publish in recognized international journals (Bennett 2014). These, then, are some of the typical competing pressures of belonging to a “folocal” discourse community.

Many people are occasional members of more than one discourse community. In my own case, I am a member of the institute where I have had an office for the last thirty years, but also I am active in the wider world of English for Academic Purposes by, for instance, serving on a number of editorial boards. My current hobbies are bird-watching and butterfly-watching, and I belong to various associations that support these similar but not identical activities. In the past, I was a member of a focal DC that brought together a very disparate group of people who were interested in the postal history of Hong Kong, about a hundred philatelists from some twenty countries. Our student services secretary is a dedicated “Whovian” (i.e., a fan of the Dr Who TV program), and last year he flew to London to attend the Dr Who 50th Anniversary Celebration . As we move from one DC to another, our verbal and social behavior adapts to the new environment, but I do not believe that this necessarily implies that we adopt new identities, or that we are somehow merely an aggregation of different personae. (Unless, of course, we are spies or under-cover agents.) My beliefs about this were brilliantly exemplified (and with an astonishing economy of words, including but a single opening verb) by Alexander Pope:

See the same man, in vigour, in the gout; Alone, in company; in place, or out; Early at business, and at hazard late; Mad at a fox-chase, wise at a debate; Drunk at a borough, civil at a ball, Friendly at Hackney, faithless at Whitehall. Epistle 1: To Cobham, 1734 (Williams 1969: 162–163)

As Pope avers, it is “ the same man ” (or woman), healthy or ill, employed or not, at work or gambling, wild at sport or sensible in discussion, drunk at an election, good-mannered at a dance, reliable and amiable in the East End of London, but not to be trusted at the seat of the central government.

Given the foregoing—ossified criteria for DCs, problems with the concept, and three contrasting types of discourse community—it is certainly time to re-imagine the concept itself, first by reflecting on the original six criteria and then more generally. In each case, I will give the Wikipedia summaries followed by updates.

A DC has a potentially discoverable set of goals. These may be publicly and explicitly formulated (as in “mission” or “vision” statements); they may be generally or partially recognized by its members; they may be broadly consensual; or they may be separate but contiguous (as when older and younger members have different ideas about the best future direction of the DC, or when there is a clash between academic researchers and practitioners, as in the just-holding-together American Psychological Association). This expansion then is designed to recognize that a DC is not necessarily utopian in flavor; it also acknowledges that DCs can flourish in darker worlds, such as those represented by Al-Q’aida, price-fixing cabals, or industry pressure groups.

Fine, but we now need to emphasize the roles of new digital channels, such as emails, blogs, tweets, etc., and we also need to stress that without any means of intercommunication of any kind, there is no real community. Subscribers to Le Monde may share certain characteristics, but they do not form a discourse community.

This third criterion was always sadly incomplete. A DC uses its participatory mechanisms to manage the operations of the DC and to promote (usually) recruitment, change, growth, and development, and to orchestrate (rarely) retrenchment and demise. In other words, these mechanisms are used to initiate actions and activities, rather than simply providing information. For instance, the employer and employees in a small shop may get together to discuss relocating; a London club may vote to admit women; or a university department, in a series of faculty meetings, may decide to drop a degree option because of low enrollment.

The use of “possesses” is rather strange as it soon becomes clear that there are not enough genres in the world for them to be “possessed” by individual DCs. A DC utilizes an evolving selection of genres in the furtherance of its sets of goals and as a means of instantiating its participatory mechanisms. These sets of genres are often particularized, as the genres are performed, re-performed, and refined, but they are rarely owned (i.e., uniquely the property of a particular DC). For instance, most university departments have regular staff meetings, but these evolve differently, with emerging differences about speaking and voting roles, about ancillary genres, such as agendas and minutes, and about allowable topics and interventions.

A DC has acquired and continues to refine DC-specific terminology. Classically, this consists of abbreviations and shorthands of all kinds, not including various kinds of codes. For example, hospitals in the U.S. have a rich menu of codes that the staff employ, especially in emergencies, partly for efficiency and partly to keep information from patients and the general public. So, “code 236 on floor six” might indicate a heart attack on that floor. In the older ELI, when we still had a placement test, we might have said among ourselves of a new international student, “She looks like a 73 across the board”. More widely, at the University of Michigan and indeed elsewhere, unofficial labels are common. Our football stadium is often referred to as “The Big House”; the central administration building is known as “the Mondrian cube” because of its architecture; and the Shapiro Library more often than not goes by its discarded old name “the UGLI” (the old name being “The Undergraduate Library”). Further, disciplinary terminology can be sui generis : recall that the classic genre set for systematic botany consists of treatment , flora , and monograph .

A DC has an explicit or implicit hierarchy and/or structure which, inter alia, manages the processes of entry into and advancement within the discourse community. The stress here on managing DC affairs reduces the somewhat static impression that the 1990 formulation produces.

We can now add two new criteria.

A DC develops a sense of “silential relations” (Becker 1995), whereby there is a sense of things that do not need to be said or to be spelt out in detail in either words or writing. Bridge players invariably say “four clubs” rather than “I bid four clubs”. Or consider the case of discoveries in the world of nature. If the discovery is of a large mammal, it will make the front pages of the world’s major newspapers. If it is of a bird, it will merit an article, including pictures or perhaps a video, in a specialized journal (Gross 1990). But suppose we have a new plant; here is a typical write-up:

Bunchosia itacarensis W R Anderson, sp. nov.–Type: Brazil. Bahia: Mun. Itacaré, 3 km S of Itacaré, forest at edge of ocean, Dec fl, Mori et al. 13081 (Holotype: MICH! CEPEC, NY, not seen).

We only know that this is a discovery because of the laconic abbreviated Latin phrase sp. nov. ; also note the interesting short hand convention in “MICH!” The exclamation mark indicates that the author has actually examined the University of Michigan specimen.

A DC develops horizons of expectation, defined rhythms of activity, a sense of its history, and value systems for what is good and less good work. Consider again the concept of the university clocks moving at different speeds that was discussed in the opening section. Or reflect on how DCs evolve rotas and rosters. Thus, in the ELI, every other Friday, somebody is responsible for clearing out the communal fridge; every so often, the administrative staff carry out a stock-taking; there is a fire-drill once a year, as well as a Christmas party; the first staff meeting of the year includes the director’s review of the previous year, and so on.

Generally speaking, and with some flexibility, all eight criteria can usually be applied to all three types of community.

It would seem that we can set up operable criteria for looking at groups in order to examine whether those groups qualify for DC status. On the other hand, actually defining discourse communities, or sub-types of them, has proved rather intractable; twenty years ago Bazerman observed that “most definitions of discourse community get ragged around the edges rapidly” (Bazerman 1994: 128), and today that situation has not greatly changed. And yet, it remains seductive, as Paul Prior explains:

Why does DC theory have such strange features: instant adoptability, resilience in the face of critique, resistance to calls for theoretical specification, the protean character of its fundamental assumptions as it migrates across theoretical and empirical traditions? (Prior 2003: 1)

It is doubtful, then, in present formulations that the concept is a robust social construct. A historian might argue that it does not account for economic and political forces; a sociologist might say that it fails to acknowledge the effects of broader social structures; an educationist might claim that it downplays acquisitional trajectories, as well as the roles of individual agency; and an anthropologist could argue that it ignores powerful aspects of cultural history. But I would counter-argue that this probably does not matter as long as our focus is on rhetorical principles of organization, on discoursal expectations, on significative linguistic tokens, and on intriguing textual extracts. Such attention on these more surface features provides insight into what at first sight might seem standard, ordinary and predictable. On this topic, I will give the last word to James Porter, whose important book is unfortunately little known outside the United States:

The term “discourse community” is useful for describing a space that was unacknowledged before because we did not have a term for it. The term realigns the traditional unities—writer, audience, text—into a new configuration. What was before largely scene, unnoticed background, becomes foreground. (Porter 1992: 84)

It is precisely this foregrounding realignment that makes the DC concept useful for languages for specific and academic purposes, and for EAP and other practitioners as they work to give students the oracy and literacy skills to survive and flourish in their diverse educational environments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_community . ( Return to text. )

Idem. ( Return to text. )

Works Cited

Bazerman, Charles. 1994. Constructing Experience . Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Beaufort, Anne. 1998. Writing in the Real World: Making the transition from school to work . New York: Teachers College Press.

Becker, Alton L. 1995. Beyond Translation: Essays toward a modern philology . Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Bennett, Karen (Ed.). 2014. The Semiperiphery of Academic Writing: Discourses, communities and practices . London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Borg, Eric. 2003. Key concepts in ELT: Discourse communities. ELT Journal 57/4, 398–400.

Flowerdew, John. 2015. John Swales’s approach to pedagogy in Genre Analysis: A perspective from 25 years on. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 19, 102–112.

Gross, Alan G. 1990. The Rhetoric of Science . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Harris, Joseph. 1989. The idea of community in the study of writing. College Composition and Communication 40, 11–22.

Johns, Ann M. 1997. Text, Role and Context . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lave, Jean & Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nystrand, Martin. 1982. What Writers Know: The language, process, and structure of written discourse . New York: Academic Press.

Porter, James E. 1992. Audience and Rhetoric: An archaeological composition of the discourse community . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Prior, Paul. 2003. Are communities of practice really an alternative to discourse communities?. Presentation at the American Association of Applied Linguistics Conference, Arlington, Virginia.

Swales, John M. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Swales, John M. 1998. Other Floors, Other Voices: A textography of a small university building . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Tannen, Deborah. 1998. The Argument Culture . New York: Random House.

Wardle, Elizabeth & Douglas Downs. 2011. Writing about Writing: A college reader . Boston: Bedford/St. Martins.

Williams, Aubrey (Ed.) 1969. Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope . Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

The Concept of Discourse Community from Composition Forum 37 (Fall 2017) Online at: http://compositionforum.com/issue/37/swales-retrospective.php © Copyright 2017 John M. Swales. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.

Return to Composition Forum 37 table of contents.

Composition Forum is published by the Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition with the support and generous financial assistance of Penn State University. Composition Forum ISSN: 1522-7502.

• Corpus ID: 56159462

Genre and discourse community

• Pedro Martín
• Published 2003
• Linguistics, Education

9 Citations

Recreating discourse community for appropriating hocs in law undergraduates’ academic writing, social media and networks as communicative acts : vulnerabilities and possibilities for the pedagogies of the future : an empirical hermeneutical study of finnish and greek teachers and students experiences, young storytellers building knowledge and communication with digital stories, create a research space (cars) in introduction of indonesian bachelor thesis: a corpus-based analysis.

• Highly Influenced

Most challenging types of offline inferences for Chinese migrants when reading public notices in Spanish

Reader comments agentive power in covid-19 digital news articles: challenging parascientific information, constructing imminent carcinogenic attack in english and arabic scientific discourse: a corpus-based contrastive study, análise de gênero para o ensino e a produção de protocolos de artigos de pesquisa em língua inglesa, examiner feedback and learning : what are the characteristics of effective remote feedback in a hierarchic, professional context, 30 references, 6. genre: language, context, and literacy, genre analysis: english in academic and research settings, genre in three traditions: implications for esl, introduction: genre analysis and world englishes, working with genre: a pragmatic perspective, genres, registers and sociolinguistics, academic discourse and critical consciousness, an introduction to systemic functional linguistics, disciplinary discourses: social interactions in academic writing, english for specific purposes: the preservation of the species (some notes on a recently evolved species and on the contribution of john swales to its preservation and protection), related papers.

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24 Understanding Discourse Communities

This chapter from Writing Spaces: Readings About Writing, Volume 3 explains why the concept of discourse communities is so important for college writing and beyond. Dan Melzer explains how genres operate within discourse communities, why different discourse communities have different expectations for writing, and how to understand what qualifies as a discourse community. The article relates the concept of discourse community to a personal example from the author (an acoustic guitar jam group) and an example of the academic discipline of history. The article takes a critical stance regarding the concept of discourse community, discussing both the benefits and constraints of communicating within discourse communities. The article concludes with writerly questions students can ask themselves as they enter new discourse communities in order to be more effective communicators.

The reading is available below or as a PDF . The PDF includes additional teacher resources.

Last year, I decided that if I was ever going to achieve my lifelong fantasy of being the first college writing teacher to transform into an international rock star, I should probably graduate from playing the video game Guitar Hero to actually learning to play guitar. [1] I bought an acoustic guitar and started watching every beginning guitar instructional video on YouTube. At first, the vocabulary the online guitar teachers used was like a foreign language to me—terms like major and minor chords, open G tuning, and circle of fifths. I was overwhelmed by how complicated it all was, and the fingertips on my left hand felt like they were going to fall off from pressing on the steel strings on the neck of my guitar to form chords. I felt like I was making incredibly slow progress, and at the rate I was going, I wouldn’t be a guitar god until I was 87. I was also getting tired of playing alone in my living room. I wanted to find a community of people who shared my goal of learning songs and playing guitar together for fun.

I needed a way to find other beginning and intermediate guitar players, and I decided to try a social media website called “Meetup.com.” It only took a few clicks to find the right community for me—an “acoustic jam” group that welcomed beginners and met once a month at a music store near my city of Sacramento, California. On the Meetup.com site, it said that everyone who showed up for the jam should bring a few songs to share, but I wasn’t sure what kind of music they played, so I just showed up at the next meet-up with my guitar and the basic look you need to become a guitar legend: two days of facial hair stubble, black t-shirt, ripped jeans, and a gravelly voice (luckily my throat was sore from shouting the lyrics to the Twenty One Pilots song “Heathens” while playing guitar in my living room the night before).

The first time I played with the group, I felt more like a junior high school band camp dropout then the next Jimi Hendrix. I had trouble keeping up with the chord changes, and I didn’t know any scales (groups of related notes in the same key that work well together) to solo on lead guitar when it was my turn. I had trouble figuring out the patterns for my strumming hand since no one took the time to explain them before we started playing a new song. The group had some beginners, but I was the least experienced player.

It took a few more meet-ups, but pretty soon I figured out how to fit into the group. I learned that they played all kinds of songs, from country to blues to folk to rock music. I learned that they chose songs with simple chords so beginners like me could play along. I learned that they brought print copies of the chords and lyrics of songs to share, and if there were any difficult chords in a song, they included a visual of the chord shape in the handout of chords and lyrics. I started to learn the musician’s vocabulary I needed to be familiar with to function in the group, like beats per measure and octaves and the minor pentatonic scale . I learned that if I was having trouble figuring out the chord changes, I could watch the better guitarists and copy what they were doing. I also got good advice from experienced players, like soaking your fingers in rubbing alcohol every day for ninety seconds to toughen them up so the steel strings wouldn’t hurt as much. I even realized that although I was an inexperienced player, I could contribute to the community by bringing in new songs they hadn’t played before.

Okay, at this point you may be saying to yourself that all of this will make a great biographical movie someday when I become a rock icon (or maybe not), but what does it have to do with becoming a better writer?

You can write in a journal alone in your room, just like you can play guitar just for yourself alone in your room. But most writers, like most musicians, learn their craft from studying experts and becoming part of a community. And most writers, like most musicians, want to be a part of community and communicate with other people who share their goals and interests. Writing teachers and scholars have come up with the concept of “discourse community” to describe a community of people who share the same goals, the same methods of communicating, the same genres, and the same lexis (specialized language).

What Exactly Is a Discourse Community?

John Swales, a scholar in linguistics, says that discourse communities have the following features (which I’m paraphrasing):

• A broadly agreed upon set of common public goals
• Mechanisms of intercommunication among members
• Use of these communication mechanisms to provide information and feedback
• One or more genres that help further the goals of the discourse community
• A specific lexis (specialized language)
• A threshold level of expert members (24-26)

I’ll use my example of the monthly guitar jam group I joined to explain these six aspects of a discourse community.

A Broadly Agreed Set of Common Public Goals

The guitar jam group had shared goals that we all agreed on. In the Meetup.com description of the site, the organizer of the group emphasized that these monthly gatherings were for having fun, enjoying the music, and learning new songs. “Guitar players” or “people who like music” or even “guitarists in Sacramento, California” are not discourse communities. They don’t share the same goals, and they don’t all interact with each other to meet the same goals.

Mechanisms of Intercommunication Among Members

The guitar jam group communicated primarily through the Meetup.com site. This is how we recruited new members, shared information about when and where we were playing, and communicated with each other outside of the night of the guitar jam. “People who use Meetup.com” are not a discourse community, because even though they’re using the same method of communication, they don’t all share the same goals and they don’t all regularly interact with each other. But a Meetup.com group like the Sacramento acoustic guitar jam focused on a specific topic with shared goals and a community of members who frequently interact can be considered a discourse community based on Swales’ definition.

Use of These Communication Mechanisms to Provide Information and Feedback

Once I found the guitar jam group on Meetup.com, I wanted information about topics like what skill levels could participate, what kind of music they played, and where and when they met. Once I was at my first guitar jam, the primary information I needed was the chords and lyrics of each song, so the handouts with chords and lyrics were a key means of providing critical information to community members. Communication mechanisms in discourse communities can be emails, text messages, social media tools, print texts, memes, oral presentations, and so on. One reason that Swales uses the term “discourse” instead of “writing” is that the term “discourse” can mean any type of communication, from talking to writing to music to images to multimedia.

One or More Genres That Help Further the Goals of the Discourse Community

One of the most common ways discourse communities share information and meet their goals is through genres. To help explain the concept of genre, I’ll use music since I’ve been talking about playing guitar and music is probably an example you can relate to. Obviously there are many types of music, from rap to country to reggae to heavy metal. Each of these types of music is considered a genre, in part because the music has shared features, from the style of the music to the subject of the lyrics to the lexis. For example, most rap has a steady bass beat, most rappers use spoken word rather singing, and rap lyrics usually draw on a lexis associated with young people. But a genre is much more than a set of features. Genres arise out of social purposes, and they’re a form of social action within discourse communities. The rap battles of today have historical roots in African oral contests, and modern rap music can only be understood in the context of hip hop culture, which includes break dancing and street art. Rap also has social purposes, including resisting social oppression and telling the truth about social conditions that aren’t always reported on by news outlets. Like all genres, rap is not just a formula but a tool for social action.

The guitar jam group used two primary genres to meet the goals of the community. The Meetup.com site was one important genre that was critical in the formation of the group and to help it recruit new members. It was also the genre that delivered information to the members about what the community was about and where and when the community would be meeting. The other important genre to the guitar jam group were the handouts with song chords and lyrics. I’m sharing an example of a song I brought to the group to show you what this genre looks like.

This genre of the chord and lyrics sheet was needed to make sure everyone could play along and follow the singer. The conventions of this genre—the “norms”—weren’t just arbitrary rules or formulas. As with all genres, the conventions developed because of the social action of the genre. The sheets included lyrics so that we could all sing along and make sure we knew when to change chords. The sheets included visuals of unusual chords, like the Em7 chord (E minor seventh) in my example, because there were some beginner guitarists who were a part of the community. If the community members were all expert guitarists, then the inclusion of chord shapes would never have become a convention. A great resource to learn more about the concept of genre is the essay “Navigating Genres” by Kerry Dirk in volume 1 of Writing Spaces .

A Specific Lexis (Specialized Language)

To anyone who wasn’t a musician, our guitar meet-ups might have sounded like we were communicating in a foreign language. We talked about the root note of scale, a 1/4/5 chord progression, putting a capo on different frets, whether to play solos in a major or minor scale, double drop D tuning, and so on. If someone couldn’t quickly identify what key their song was in or how many beats per measure the strumming pattern required, they wouldn’t be able to communicate effectively with the community members. We didn’t use this language to show off or to try to discourage outsiders from joining our group. We needed these specialized terms—this musician’s lexis—to make sure we were all playing together effectively.

A Threshold Level of Expert Members

If everyone in the guitar jam was at my beginner level when I first joined the group, we wouldn’t have been very successful. I relied on more experienced players to figure out strumming patterns and chord changes, and I learned to improve my solos by watching other players use various techniques in their soloing. The most experienced players also helped educate everyone on the conventions of the group (the “norms” of how the group interacted). These conventions included everyone playing in the same key, everyone taking turns playing solo lead guitar, and everyone bringing songs to play. But discourse community conventions aren’t always just about maintaining group harmony. In most discourse communities, new members can also expand the knowledge and genres of the community. For example, I shared songs that no one had brought before, and that expanded the community’s base of knowledge.

Why the Concept of Discourse Communities Matters for College Writing

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, I didn’t understand that each academic discipline I took courses in to complete the requirements of my degree (history, philosophy, biology, math, political science, sociology, English) was a different discourse community. Each of these academic fields had their own goals, their own genres, their own writing conventions, their own formats for citing sources, and their own expectations for writing style. I thought each of the teachers I encountered in my undergraduate career just had their own personal preferences that all felt pretty random to me. I didn’t understand that each teacher was trying to act as a representative of the discourse community of their field. I was a new member of their discourse communities, and they were introducing me to the genres and conventions of their disciplines. Unfortunately, teachers are so used to the conventions of their discourse communities that they sometimes don’t explain to students the reasons behind the writing conventions of their discourse communities.

It wasn’t until I studied research about college writing while I was in graduate school that I learned about genres and discourse communities, and by the time I was doing my dissertation for my PhD, I got so interested in studying college writing that I did a national study of college teachers’ writing assignments and syllabi. Believe it or not, I analyzed the genres and discourse communities of over 2,000 college writing assignments in my book Assignments Across the Curriculum . To show you why the idea of discourse community is so important to college writing, I’m going to share with you some information from one of the academic disciplines I studied: history. First I want to share with you an excerpt from a history course writing assignment from my study. As you read it over, think about what it tells you about the conventions of the discourse community of history.

Documentary Analysis

This assignment requires you to play the detective, combing textual sources for clues and evidence to form a reconstruction of past events. If you took A.P. history courses in high school, you may recall doing similar document-based questions (DBQs). In a tight, well-argued essay of two to four pages, identify and assess the historical significance of the documents in ONE of the four sets I have given you.

You bring to this assignment a limited body of outside knowledge gained from our readings, class discussions, and videos. Make the most of this contextual knowledge when interpreting your sources: you may, for example, refer to one of the document from another set if it sheds light on the items in your own.

Questions to Consider When Planning Your Essay

• What do the documents reveal about the author and his audience?
• Why were they written?
• What can you discern about the author’s motivation and tone? Is the tone revealing?
• Does the genre make a difference in your interpretation?
• How do the documents fit into both their immediate and their greater historical contexts?
• Do your documents support or contradict what other sources (video, readings) have told you?
• Do the documents reveal a change that occurred over a period of time?
• Is there a contrast between documents within your set? If so, how do you account for it?
• Do they shed light on a historical event, problem, or period? How do they fit into the “big picture”?
• What incidental information can you glean from them by reading carefully? Such information is important for constructing a narrative of the past; our medieval authors almost always tell us more than they intended to.
• What is not said, but implied?
• What is left out? (As a historian, you should always look for what is not said, and ask yourself what the omission signifies.)
• Taken together, do the documents reveal anything significant about the period in question? (Melzer 3-4)

This assignment doesn’t just represent the specific preferences of one random teacher. It’s a common history genre (the documentary analysis) that helps introduce students to the ways of thinking and the communication conventions of the discourse community of historians. This genre reveals that historians look for textual clues to reconstruct past events and that historians bring their own knowledge to bear when they analyze texts and interpret history (historians are not entirely “objective” or “neutral”). In this documentary analysis genre, the instructor emphasizes that historians are always looking for what is not said but instead is implied. This instructor is using an important genre of history to introduce students to the ways of analyzing and thinking in the discourse community of historians. Let’s look at another history course in my research. I’m sharing with you an excerpt from the syllabus of a history of the American West course. This part of the syllabus gives students an overview of the purpose of the writing projects in the class. As you read this overview, think about the ways this instructor is portraying the discourse community of historians.

A300: History of the American West

A300 is designed to allow students to explore the history of the American West on a personal level with an eye toward expanding their knowledge of various western themes, from exploration to the Indian Wars, to the impact of global capitalism and the emergence of the environmental movement. But students will also learn about the craft of history, including the tools used by practitioners, how to weigh competing evidence, and how to build a convincing argument about the past.

At the end of this course students should understand that history is socially interpreted, and that the past has always been used as an important means for understanding the present. Old family photos, a grandparent’s memories, even family reunions allow people to understand their lives through an appreciation of the past. These events and artifacts remind us that history is a dynamic and interpretive field of study that requires far more than rote memorization. Historians balance their knowledge of primary sources (diaries, letters, artifacts, and other documents from the period under study) with later interpretations of these people, places, and events (in the form of scholarly monographs and articles) known as secondary sources. Through the evaluation and discussion of these different interpretations historians come to a socially negotiated understanding of historical figures and events.

Individual Projects

More generally, your papers should:

• Empathize with the person, place, or event you are writing about. The goal here is to use your understanding of the primary and secondary sources you have read to “become” that person–i.e. to appreciate their perspectives on the time or event under study. In essence, students should demonstrate an appreciation of that time within its context.
• Second, students should be able to present the past in terms of its relevance to contemporary issues. What do their individual projects tell us about the present? For example, what does the treatment of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans in the West tell us about the problem of race in the United States today?
• Third, in developing their individual and group projects, students should demonstrate that they have researched and located primary and secondary sources. Through this process they will develop the skills of a historian, and present an interpretation of the past that is credible to their peers and instructors.

Just like the history instructor who gave students the documentary analysis assignment, this history of the American West instructor emphasizes that the discourse community of historians doesn’t focus on just memorizing facts, but on analyzing and interpreting competing evidence. Both the documentary analysis assignment and the information from the history of the American West syllabus show that an important shared goal of the discourse community of historians is socially constructing the past using evidence from different types of artifacts, from texts to photos to interviews with people who have lived through important historical events. The discourse community goals and conventions of the different academic disciplines you encounter as an undergraduate shape everything about writing: which genres are most important, what counts as evidence, how arguments are constructed, and what style is most appropriate and effective.

The history of the American West course is a good example of the ways that discourse community goals and values can change over time. It wasn’t that long ago that American historians who wrote about the West operated on the philosophy of “manifest destiny.” Most early historians of the American West assumed that the American colonizers had the right to take land from indigenous tribes—that it was the white European’s “destiny” to colonize the American West. The evidence early historians used in their writing and the ways they interpreted that evidence relied on the perspectives of the “settlers,” and the perspectives of the indigenous people were ignored by historians. The concept of manifest destiny has been strongly critiqued by modern historians, and one of the primary goals of most modern historians who write about the American West is to recover the perspectives and stories of the indigenous peoples as well as to continue to work for social justice for Native Americans by showing how historical injustices continue in different forms to the present day. Native American historians are now retelling history from the perspective of indigenous people, using indigenous research methods that are often much different than the traditional research methods of historians of the American West. Discourse community norms can silence and marginalize people, but discourse communities can also be transformed by new members who challenge the goals and assumptions and research methods and genre conventions of the community.

Discourse Communities from School to Work and Beyond

Understanding what a discourse community is and the ways that genres perform social actions in discourse communities can help you better understand where your college teachers are coming from in their writing assignments and also help you understand why there are different writing expectations and genres for different classes in different fields. Researchers who study college writing have discovered that most students struggle with writing when they first enter the discourse community of their chosen major, just like I struggled when I first joined the acoustic guitar jam group. When you graduate college and start your first job, you will probably also find yourself struggling a bit with trying to learn the writing conventions of the discourse community of your workplace. Knowing how discourse communities work will not only help you as you navigate the writing assigned in different general education courses and the specialized writing of your chosen major, but it will also help you in your life after college. Whether you work as a scientist in a lab or a lawyer for a firm or a nurse in a hospital, you will need to become a member of a discourse community. You’ll need to learn to communicate effectively using the genres of the discourse community of your workplace, and this might mean asking questions of more experienced discourse community members, analyzing models of the types of genres you’re expected to use to communicate, and thinking about the most effective style, tone, format, and structure for your audience and purpose. Some workplaces have guidelines for how to write in the genres of the discourse community, and some workplaces will initiate you to their genres by trial and error. But hopefully now that you’ve read this essay, you’ll have a better idea of what kinds of questions to ask to help you become an effective communicator in a new discourse community. I’ll end this essay with a list of questions you can ask yourself whenever you’re entering a new discourse community and learning the genres of the community:

• What are the goals of the discourse community?
• What are the most important genres community members use to achieve these goals?
• Who are the most experienced communicators in the discourse community?
• Where can I find models of the kinds of genres used by the discourse community?
• Who are the different audiences the discourse community communicates with, and how can I adjust my writing for these different audiences?
• What conventions of format, organization, and style does the discourse community value?
• What specialized vocabulary (lexis) do I need to know to communicate effectively with discourse community insiders?
• How does the discourse community make arguments, and what types of evidence are valued?
• Do the conventions of the discourse community silence any members or force any members to conform to the community in ways that make them uncomfortable?
• What can I add to the discourse community?

Works Cited

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces , vol. 1, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 249–262.

Guitar Hero . Harmonics, 2005.

Meetup.com . WeWork Companies Inc., 2019. www.meetup.com.

Melzer, Daniel. Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing . Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2014.

Swales, John. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings . Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Twenty One Pilots. “Heathens.” Suicide Squad: The Album , Atlantic Records, 2016.

Young, Neil. “Heart of Gold.” Harvest , Reprise Records, 1972.

discourse community , genre

Dan Melzer is the Associate Director of First-Year Composition at the University of California, Davis. His research interests include writing across the curriculum, writing program administration, and multiple literacies. His articles have appeared in College Composition and Communication, Writing Program Administration, Kairos, The WAC Journal, and other publications.

• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and are subject to the Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, email [email protected], or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.org/terms-of-use. ↵

a community of people who share the same goals, methods of communicating, genres, and specialized language

often thought of as a type or category of writing, e.g. business memos, organization charts, menus, book reviews; a discursive response to a recurrent, social action; materials that mediate social interaction

Understanding Discourse Communities Copyright © by Dan Melzer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Discourse Community Essay Examples

Discourse community essay is an essential part of academic writing that requires students to explore a specific group’s communication methods and practices. To write a successful discourse community essay, you need to understand the group’s language, values, and beliefs. Here are some tips on how to write a discourse community essay that stands out.

Firstly, before writing, conduct thorough research on the discourse community you wish to write about. Understanding the group’s communication methods, practices, and language is essential. Take time to observe the community’s communication methods and the roles of its members. Conduct interviews with members of the group to gain insights into their communication practices and understand their perspectives.

Next, brainstorm discourse community essay topic ideas that align with your research. This should help you identify the unique aspects of the discourse community that you would like to focus on in your essay. Ensure that your essay is well-structured and well-researched to make it informative and easy to read. You can also use the research to draw comparisons and contrasts between the discourse community you are writing about and other groups.

To make your essay stand out, include relevant discourse community essay examples to illustrate the communication methods and practices you are discussing. This will give your readers a better understanding of the group you are writing about and make your essay more engaging. You can also include personal experiences or stories that relate to the discourse community to make your essay more relatable.

In conclusion, writing a discourse community essay requires a lot of research and attention to detail. However, with the right approach and techniques, you can produce a well-structured and informative essay that highlights the unique communication practices of the group. Always remember to include relevant examples and personal experiences to make your essay more engaging.

The Soccer Discourse Community: Passion, Identity, and Global Connection

Soccer, known as football to most of the world, is more than just a sport; it is a universal language that transcends geographical borders and cultural differences. Within the realm of this beloved game lies a dynamic and tightly-knit soccer discourse community. This essay explores...

• Discourse Community

The Nursing Discourse Community: Shared Knowledge and Collaboration

Nursing is a noble and demanding profession that thrives on collaboration, empathy, and the exchange of knowledge. Within the vast healthcare landscape, the concept of a nursing discourse community emerges as a dynamic network of professionals who share a common language, values, and goals. This...

Highly Resistant Hegemonic Discourses in the Sport

This essay will look at highly resistant hegemonic discourses in sport that relate to ethnicity and race, and whether these discourses have been successfully challenged by the promotion of alternative discourses in recent years. Therefore, both the highly resistant discourses and the new alternative discourses...

• Discourse Analysis

The Discourse Community Analysis Of A Football Team

I came to UC Merced and joined Writing 001 with no knowledge of what a discourse could be. Now in Lovas’s class reading “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie. I had no idea what a discourse community was, the idea of this is very well...

K-Pop: Unveiling Its Discourse Community and Influence

The major difference between humans and animals is the ability to communicate with each other. Throughout the course of human development, people need a way for mass communication to reach a final decision or to represent a certain point of view or belief. This can...

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Exploring the Discourse Community of Personal trainers or Fitness instructors

Introduction As a newly certified Coach and professional personal trainer, I am writing this report for the new comer to the discourse community of personal trainer. What is the history of this community? What are its primary mechanisms of intercommunication? What kind of threshold levels...

The Communities That I Belong To

The concept of a discourse community is ambiguous in nature. Despite that, one thing can be said for sure—that most of us, in one way or another, belong to one. As defined by John Swales, discourse communities are people who use communication to reach a...

• Intercultural Communication

The Goals of the Sociology Discourse Community and the Issues within It

Introduction Discourse community is defined in the Genre Analysis as the “Increasingly common assumption that discourse operates within conventions defined by communities, be they academic disciplines or social groups”. (Herzberg Pg. 21). As this is a very simple break down of the term discourse community,...

• Interpersonal Communication

The Key Role of Functionalism in a Societal Equilibrium

Functionalism emphasizes a societal equilibrium. To put it into perspective if something happens to disrupt the order and the flow of the system, a set of interconnected parts which together form a whole, society must adjust to achieve a stable state. Functionalism is a top...

• Emile Durkheim
• Functionalism

The Theoretical and Practical Application of the Functionalism Theory

Functionalism became the most well known within the end of the 20th century. (Knox (2007) pg. 2) Although, functionalism has several antecedents in ancient philosophy and early theories of A.I and technology as well. The first view that one can possible argue to be a...

Conversation as a Target of Discourse and Disciple Analysis

Discourse as Nunan (1993) defines it is ‘a stretch of language consisting of several sentences which are perceived as related in some way’; Within the definition of discourse, it can be found that discourse refers as much spoken as written kind of languages. However, many...

• Anthropology
• Conversation

A Study of Discourse Community Through BLM Movement

A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of goals, which are basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. The ability to communicate is very important to a discourse community. It is important because without communication the...

• Black Lives Matter

Analysis of Nursing Community According to Swales' Characteristics of Discourse Community

A discourse community is people with similar interest and goals in life, who share a language that helps them discuss and accomplish these interests and goals. In the nursing community, many code words are used for different events and situations. All nurses maintain the same...

School Theatre as an Example of Discourse Community

Everyone has successfully been able to join a discourse community. School clubs, sports teams, teachers, a job, a group of friends, or even a family can be classified into two words discourse community. According to James Paul Gee, “a discourse is a sort of identity...

Music in My Life: Being a Part of Musical Discourse

A discourse community is defined as “A group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. ” An easier way of wording the definition comes from Linguist John Swales and he defines...

• Music Industry

Best topics on Discourse Community

1. The Soccer Discourse Community: Passion, Identity, and Global Connection

2. The Nursing Discourse Community: Shared Knowledge and Collaboration

3. Highly Resistant Hegemonic Discourses in the Sport

4. The Discourse Community Analysis Of A Football Team

5. K-Pop: Unveiling Its Discourse Community and Influence

6. Exploring the Discourse Community of Personal trainers or Fitness instructors

7. The Communities That I Belong To

8. The Goals of the Sociology Discourse Community and the Issues within It

9. The Key Role of Functionalism in a Societal Equilibrium

10. The Theoretical and Practical Application of the Functionalism Theory

11. Conversation as a Target of Discourse and Disciple Analysis

12. A Study of Discourse Community Through BLM Movement

13. Analysis of Nursing Community According to Swales’ Characteristics of Discourse Community

14. School Theatre as an Example of Discourse Community

15. Music in My Life: Being a Part of Musical Discourse

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