Characteristics of Discourse Communities

10/26/2015
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At the beginning of this reading it gives a description of what John Swales is all about, what is
occupation was and what books he wrote. The rest of this section has a lot of words that are
bolded and defined, later telling of how one of the most important characteristics Swale
discusses is genre. In different rhetorical situations, there are obviously different ways to write
different texts to meet the needs that are expected. An example related to school is that there
are specific rules in writing in MLA and APA formatting, so when writing a paper one should
know which type of formatting they should be using in order to not miss silly points in an essay.
Swale then begins to describe the six characteristics needed to identify a group of people as a
discourse community. The first one says that there is a set of common public goals that a
discourse community has broadly agreed on. I would think an example of this would be a breast
cancer organization. The main goal of this organization is to raise awareness of breast cancer
and raise money for research. The second characteristic is that there are mechanisms of
intercommunication among a discourse communitys members. For example, everyone who is
taking this UWRT 1101 class is learning the same material, but having different teachers that
teach each class in their own ways differentiates the way the individuals of each class learn.
Since we are learning the same content as another UWRT class, we can help each other in
giving each other feedback on essays. Another characteristic Swale talks about is that discourse
communities use their participatory mechanisms to provide information and feedback. An
example of this is that I am in womens chorus here at UNCC and we are having a concert in
December. We will use the feedback audience members give us so that the professor will know
what they did and didnt like about the performance. The next characteristic says that a
discourse community uses one or more genres to communicate and further its aims. For the
womens volleyball club that I participate in, there are different forms of communication it uses,
some being flyers, website, Facebook page, and email. Another characteristic is that discourse
communities use specific lexis. In a broad sense, the social media community uses lexis like
lol, omg, and stg that others may not know what they mean. Lastly, Swale says that
discourse communities possess levels of different members, some being more expert than
others. An example of this is that within a major, seniors have way more knowledge of the

subject than incoming freshmen do, but in a few years those freshmen will be as knowledgeable
as the seniors were.