Swales clearly states that not every group is considered a discourse community. As explained in class, I can expand on his statement and fully agree. This specific community must share a common set of goals and beliefs to spread the knowledge among their group.
He also explained the difference between a speech community and a discourse community. Discourse with a capital “D” is the broad term for Discourse, discourse with a lowercase “d” is the more specific term that has more strict rules to be followed. They have a more common set of rules to be followed internally for the members. Personally, if you asked me before learning about Discourse in general, I would never think that discourse with a lowercase “d” is more strict compared to Discourse.
Not only does he explain this, but he jumps into the topic of genres and how they develop over time in a response to rhetorical needs. These certain discourse communities all use genres even if they don’t know exactly what it is, they use genres subconsciously. These aren’t the genres we normally think of, however, these genres have meaning behind it
To reflect on this reading, I can definitely say that this helped me grasp more of the concept on what exactly Discourse really is. I am now able to differentiate Discourse from discourse and know that though there are many discourses, not every is a discourse community. I was extremely confused going into this at first but looking at it from the class discussion and also Swales point of view, each piece of the puzzle is starting to come together.
Leave a Reply