Kevin Tomasetti

ke269036
Discourse Community Discussion
ENC1101
Leslie Wolcott
11/12/2014
Most people don't consciously break down their everyday behavior by which discourse
community they are in at a given time. Perhaps some people may not even know what a discourse
community is, but unknowingly may be a part of one or more. With this we come to the question,
What is a discourse community?, and to that there is no simple answer. There are many qualities that
discourse communities share which can be assessed to write up a definition. Although some argue that
if a group is missing one of these qualities but still fits the profile of a discourse community it should
thus be given the title of a discourse community. These qualities are discussed in an article titled The
Concept of Discourse Community by John Swales. In this article Swales breaks a characterizes a
discourse community as having six qualities. Swales suggests that a discourse community has

an agreed set of common public goals, has mechanisms of intercommunication among its
members, uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback,
utilizes and hence possess one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, has
a specific lexis, and a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and
discourse expertise.

We take these six qualities as a reference of what a discourse community should consist of as Swales
was not personally put in charge of defining discourse communities. Essentially, discourse
communities have a main goal in which all of the members are trying to achieve. They way they
achieve this goal leads to different lexis, communicative devices, have an essential theme or genre, and
have some leadership or members who have a background of expertise in whichever genre or field it is

Kevin Tomasetti
ke269036
Discourse Community Discussion
ENC1101
Leslie Wolcott
11/12/2014
that a given discourse community is categorized as. With this we can gather that a discourse
community can be anything from a little league baseball team to a daily grind nine-to-five desk job.
One of the key qualities that distinguishes a discourse community from others is its lexis. Lexis
can be related to how a group speaks, such as vocabulary, contextual assumptions, and a general
understanding of the history of the group to understand references from the past. For example, a group
of aerospace engineers who work together to create more efficient airplanes are going to have a much
different lexis than an acting group who want to put on a show for their audience. The terminology will
be significantly different to the point where each others groups may not even be able to understand
what the other is attempting to say. This is why lexis is so important in a discourse community,
understanding and knowing the lexis is crucial to performing well in that discourse community.
Furthermore, intertextuality is another key characteristic that discourse communities have. As
James E. Porter describes, A discourse community shares assumptions about what objects are
appropriate for examination and discussion, what operating functions are performed on those objects,
what constitutes evidence and validity, and what formal conventions are followed. Intertextuality
can be shared throughout the entirety of the discourse community. Certain texts could be relating to
other texts written about a certain event. For example, an aerospace engineering group could have
carried out an experiment testing the validity of the aerodynamics of a new airplane wing. In the future
this event could be referenced with intertextuality assuming that everyone in the discourse community
knew of the experiment and its results and would then know what the text that they were currently
reading was relating to. Someone outside of this discourse community may not have the knowledge of
the experiment or even the vocabulary to understand what the text is trying to portray to them by

Kevin Tomasetti
ke269036
Discourse Community Discussion
ENC1101
Leslie Wolcott
11/12/2014
referencing an experiment on a wing carried out prior.
Conclusively, we can say that discourse communities appear more often than we think and
apply to more people than we may have thought. After discussing guidelines and examples of both
intertextuality and lexis we get a good understanding of what makes up a discourse community. If
anything, this book has taught me that there is more to life than what it seems. That sounds broad I am
aware, but realizing that there is this sort of analysis for such a thing that many people may not even
recognize opens my mind up to what else there may be out there. I feel although as if there are
hundreds of different ways of evaluating how we go about our daily life that people are studying right
now that I am completely unaware of. Learning about discourse communities and finding myself
understanding more about the way we interact with each other within these discourse communities
leads me to believe that there is more reasoning behind our actions, it just takes the right perspective
and thoughts to figure it out.

Work Cited
Swales, John. Create A research Space (CARS) Model of Research Introductions. English in
Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge.1990
Porter, James. Intertextuality in the Discourse Community. Rhetoric Review 5.1 (1986): (3447). Print