The main point of The Concept of Discourse Community by John Swales is to educate and provide the reader with a framework on what a “discourse community” is. Swales begins by educating the reader on how this concept of a discourse community has been and continues interpreted in different ways. Although he disagrees he cites that it is possible to compare a discourse community to a speech community, which is “a community sharing knowledge of at least one form of speech, and knowledge also of its patterns of use” (Swales p. 6). After giving a brief explanation and comparison on speech communities, Swales calls attention to what makes a discourse community different from speech community. The primary difference that Swales gives the reader is that the speech community revolves around socialization, in contrast a discourse community “consists of a group of people who link up in order pursue objectives that are prior to those of socialization and solidarity, even if these latter should consequently occur.” With that being said my interpretation of a discourse group is that it is a group of people with a shared speech trying to accomplish a greater goal. To conceptualize the idea of a discourse community Swales lists several criteria that make the community,

1. A discourse community has a broady agreed set of common public goals
2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members
3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback
4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims

 

What I found most interesting about the idea of a discourse group is that it fit perfectly to the United State congress. At first I had a trouble grappling the idea how a discourse group works towards a public goal while its participatory mechanism revolved around feedback and information. However, after Swales compared it how congress works, especially citing how common public good, it makes sense that feedback and information are critical to the community. After analyzing and understanding this reading I strongly agree with Swales on his criteria of a discourse group. I particularly agree with the idea that a discourse group should have mechanisms of intercommunication, as this is critical to providing feedback to each other, which will ultimately bring the group together for the common public goals that they are trying to achieve.

 

I believe that this reading will impact me as a writer simply by giving me the knowledge and frame of what a discourse community is. With this knowledge I will be able to analyze the discourse groups that I have participated in for the upcoming essay. In fact the community that I intend on using for the first essay is my high school orchestra, which I have already found to resonate several of the criteria Swales has provided.