Discourses: How Do Communities Shape Writing?

• Discourses are a group of people in the same setting during that time
• A group of people shared goals or purposes and uses communication to accomplish them is a discourse community
• Use of language, interpretation of media, and ways of seeing can all very between different discourses
• Communities of practice is another name for discourse communities
• People keep learning to write and use language in new ways with more interaction between different discourses

The Concept of Discourse Community

• “Cluster of ideas” is a way to help identify a discourse community but not definitively
• This Swale guy has a problem with how vague the term “discourse community” is defined and wants to lay out a narrower definition
• Some define or look at discourse communities as a subset of speech communities
• Speech community is a group that share similar linguistic rules
• A discourse community (DC) has a broadly agreed set of common public goals
• A DC has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members
• A DC uses it participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback
• A DC utilizes and possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims
• In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis (aka specific language, lingo, or slang used by the DC)
• A DC has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise (maintaining a reasonable novice to expert ratio in the group)
• DCs don’t have to be in an academic setting/ academic group
• This definition/view of DC doesn’t account for or look at any sort of conflict in the group