“The Concept of Discourse Community” by John Swales: Reading Response

This blog post is an answer to the chapter in the genre analysis book by John Swales, professor of ethics. In this chapter Swales solves the gap in that discipline by trying to define the concept of discourse community. He first pointed out that the discourse community was not clearly defined as a language community or misclassified. John Swales points out specific differences as well as specific criteria for judging whether the community is a discourse community.

One of his arguments is "the need to distinguish between social and community linguistic communities" (Swales, paragraph 8). He believes that "group communication needs such as socialization" is the reason for forming such groups and promoting their interaction. According to Swales of the sociolinguistic discourse community, this situation is fundamentally different, people are "connected to pursue goals before socialization ..."

The six criteria specified by Swales are the qualifications of the group as a discourse community. According to him, the discourse community has specific members with common public goals, communication methods, participation mechanisms, one or more kinds of sentences, specific vocabulary, and related expertise.

I can quickly tell you that I am not a reader or an audience of this article. John Swales is written in a way that is appropriate for British scholars and experts. Even so, this is not the most attractive for a first-year student like me. Indeed, while reading this chapter, I noticed what I am annoying.

To say the least, when I read it is very sad. I have to use some reading strategies to get started. I have read it several times. I looked for at least some definitions of unfamiliar words. It was originally distributed electronically to us, so I also printed it. After printing, highlight it and emphasize taking notes to clarify important parts.

John Swales's concept of discourse community is harder to read than plain text, even after reading twice. It is difficult, but the beginning of the text is useful to me. Because it warns beforehand that Swale's writing is very dry and uses technical terms. This made me sit down and in fact I focused more on writing than usual. Reading is very confused, but Swales is doing a good job to summarize the definition of his interactive community. Swales uses six predefined functions to identify groups of individuals as discourse communities. These features give me a better understanding of the discourse community as it outlines the main points. But the most striking thing for me is the last statement that the discourse community has the relevant level of relevant content and discourse expertise.

John Swales, University of Michigan, University of Michigan, Professor of Linguistics. In 1990 Swales wrote an article called "The Discourse Community's Concept". Sales defines the discourse community (a group of people with the same language rules) and describes the six characteristics that the community should follow to become a discourse community. The six features are as follows: James Porter's textual dialogue and discourse The community is an article published in rhetorical commentary on the content of the discourse community's original text in the autumn of 1986. Text interactivity is a network that conveys sentences and voices (Porter, 1986). Porter insists that writing is very similar to reading, and the background of the work written is an explanation of the reader (Porter, 1986).