A discourse community is a type of community. These communities have common goals, and ways of communication, which they use to provide feedback, use genres and their specific lexis to further their goals, and has members with expertise in said goals. John Swales in his “The Concept of Discourse Community” discusses these types of communities. To him, Discourse communities are similar to Speech Communities. Speech communities share similar linguistic rules, are more socially driven, people are more general rather than focused on a topic, and can be about literacy, not just writing. He then talks about the characteristics of a discord community and how they would be visualized in certain settings. He then gives examples of discourse communities, so I will provide my own example. I am part of a writer’s discord server. All those in the said server are amateur writers with the goal of eventually publishing some of our works. We share our writing with each other, gaining feedback to improve it. As we have an emphasis on fanfiction and use terms relating to it when discussing our work. This makes said server, a Discourse Community. Although these types of communities are mostly beneficial, allowing like-minded people to discuss their interests under the supervision of someone more skilled in the subject, there are downsides. It can be hard to set boundaries and due to everyone having similar ideals, it can lead to an echo chamber effect. It’s important to have interactions with others outside the discourse community, less you forget others think differently.
The Discourse in Discourse Communities
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