Summary:

Some main points:

“That language use in a group is a form of social behavior, that discourse is a means of maintaining and extending the group’s knowledge and of imitating new members into the group, and that discourse is epistemic or constitutive of the group’s knowledge.”(468) Swales defines discourse community.

“At the outset, a speech community was seen as being composed of those who share similar linguistic rules.”(470) Swales highlights the differences between a speech community, and a discourse community.

A discourse community has a specific set of characteristics which help define it. In order to have a specific way of communicating, the main characteristic which defines each member of a specific community is that each member has to share a common goal, as well as sharing a specific set of values or beliefs.

“A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.”(472) Each member uses specific mechanisms to communicate information and feedback to one another.

“These may involve appropriacy of topics, the forms, function and positioning of discoursal elements, and the roles texts play in the operation of the discourse community.”(472)

“…community-specific abbreviations and acronyms.”(473) Each community has its own abbreviations of words and phrases that only they as a community can understand.

“A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.”(473) In order to be a member of the discourse community, one must have a decent amount of relevant information to share and must have a certain level of expertise.

Response:Overall the text was often confusing. It takes a while to understand the point of the text, which seemed to be that each discourse community has a set of rules and objectives that a person must follow in order to be a part of that community. Swales outlines the difference between a speech community and a discourse community. The main difference appears to be that a speech community is a much broader community that “share linguistic rules”(470) and a discourse community is one that has a set of goals they want to achieve which assist in the development of characteristics required to be a part of any discourse community.

Reflection: As I was reading through the text, I found myself trying to relate by thinking about what discourse community I am a part of. By adding anecdotes of my own personal discourse community could make an essay more relatable to the person reading it provokes thoughts about what each persons discourse community is. Swales incorporates a lot of examples into his text, which is the main reason I began to understand what I was reading. Before the examples, I was confused by broad definitions and comparisons, but once I read the quote “New York City is a single speech community, and not a collection of speakers living side by side, borrowing occasionally from each other’s dialects'(Labov, 1966:7).”(470), the point Swales was trying to make was becoming more apparent.