Reading Response 14

Getting Ready to Read
One time, I went to a barbecue with my parents at one of their friend's house.  It sounded fun, but when I got there everyone there was an older adult and I felt out of place, with no one to talk too.  I felt like I was too young and that I didn't fit in with the crowd.  Eventually I just started talking to people and shrugged off the feeling.

Summary
In his article "The Concept of Discourse Community" John Swales attempts to define discourse community and separate it from a speech community.  Discourse communities must have six specific features.  First, the members must have agreed on goals for the discourse community.  This could be legislators wanting to pass laws or the makers of a newspaper wanting to sell more papers.  Members of a discourse community must be able to communicate with each other in order to maintain and advance the discourse community.  The members must also be able to criticize the discourse community in order to better it.  A discourse community must have specific genres, or how its members are supposed to write.  They must have some of their own lexis, or words that have a unique meaning to the group.  And finally, discourse communities must have some members that are new and some that are experts on the subjects in order to survive.

Synthesis
This article relates to James Porter's article "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community" because both articles dive into discourse communities.  The main difference is that Porter introduces the reader to discourse communities and writes about much less complex aspects of them than Swales, who goes very deep into them.

Review
I found this piece hard to follow and understand, although I do understand what a discourse community is and their six main aspects.  I think that Swales was writing for an audience that is much more educated and interested in English than I am.

QD
5.  I belong to the discourse community of my group of friends when we all text each other.  We have goals, we want to find out what the person we are texting is doing and hang out with them or ask them a question to get help with a class.  We have mechanisms for intercommunication, cell phones.  That is also our mechanism for information and feedback.  We like to text in certain ways and use words that reflect that, creating a genre.  We do not have words that have specific meaning to us, but there are words that may have different meaning to most people.  The last characteristic does not apply well because we are all on an equal level as far as expertise.