Project 3 Introduction
Whether we know
it or not, everyone belongs to one or more discourse communities. A discourse
community is essentially a group of people who share the same goals, skills,
ideas, and so on. A discourse community can be a group of any persons; it is
not just limited to academia. While the idea that comes to mind when one thinks
of discourse community is academic, another example of discourse community could
be persons who avidly play Call of Duty.
Once one understands the concept of
discourse community, one can begin to understand how relationships with others
are so much a part of our writing and language. Discourse communities tend to
have a lexis; or ways of communicating between members. This is one way that
writing is influenced by discourse community. If the target audience of a piece
of writing is one’s own discourse community, the language would be different
than a piece that wasn’t targeted to non-members of the discourse.
A few authors have given readers
insight to the topic of discourse community, but perhaps one author that really
spells out his idea of how this concept is defined is John Swales in his
article “The Concept of Discourse Community.” He uses six characteristics to
define discourse community, which one can relate back to writing. These six
characteristics are that the group has an agreed set of public goals, has
mechanisms of intercommunications among members, uses its participatory
mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, utilizes one or more
genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, has an acquired lexis, and
has a threshold level of members with relevant content and discoursal
expertise.
To add to Swales’ argument, one could
look at a few articles by Amy Devitt, Anis Bawarshi, and Mary Jo Reiff. These three
articles focus on genre analysis to define a discourse community. They use
relationships between teachers, students, and researchers within a hospital to
explain discourse community. The article shows how the things that these people
do in this setting is much like a discourse community.
Another author that adds a great deal
to the conversation about discourse community is James Paul Gee in his article
“Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics.” He takes a different approach to
discourse than the previous authors listed because in this article Gee focuses
on how discourse defines us as people; not how the discourse community is
defined itself.
Gee also introduces the concept of
primary and secondary discourses; proving his point even more. To briefly explain
this concept, a primary discourse is the first discourse that we belong to;
these are set by our families and the things that are instilled in us early in
life. Therefore, a secondary discourse is one that we encounter later in life
and often choose.
Elizabeth Wardle also expands upon the
concept of discourse community in her article “Identity, Authority, and
Learning to Write in New Workplaces.” This article also deals a lot with
identity and how it relates to writing and discourse community with her example
of Alan, a newcomer to a job setting.
According to these authors, there is
more than one way of defining discourse community. To get the best definition,
perhaps one would have to look at all of the ways there are to define discourse
community and combine them.
If there was a set definition of
discourse community, would it differ from one discourse to another? If one were
to study a discourse related to video games, would anything change if the discourse
studied was related to art?
Perhaps discourse community is a
mixture of a few definitions; and not only has a definition, but also the power
to define us. If a person identifies as an artist, does that mean that they’re
discourse defines them?
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