Blog #4: John Swales and the Discourse Community

So I hope you have all discovered an emotionally and tension driven rhetorical situation to respond to in your op/ed. My husband and I are sharing the weekend with friends who have very different political opinions than ours, and we have discussed quite a few of these issues. Happily, even though our conclusions are different, our goals and motivations are the same, and so we work to acknowledge the complexities of the issues we are discussing so that we remain friends. (One of my friends is a judge, and so his job is to remain objective; my job is to teach critical thinking, and so my job is to consider complexities. Our spouses talk about other things.)

The op/ed is so very different. The op/ed is presenting an unabashed opinion, well reasoned, complete with details that make your position seem to bring light on the issue. Have fun. Be creative.

In the meantime, I want you to read something that is pretty much the opposite of creative:
John Swales and the Discourse Community, available on Bb.

Yes, despite the fact that Swales got his own postage stamp (I don't know if that's real or not), this is

not riveting reading.

I personally think Swales, a linguist who studies patterns of writing, is a genius, but I also personally think that his writing, especially this article, is pretty stiff. That's why I didn't give you the whole paper. (If you REALLY want it, I can find it, and we can discuss it at length. That is, if you REALLY want it.)

The thing is, everything we read about the concept of discourse community is going to go right back to what Swales described in this excerpt, so if we want to have a meaningful conversation about discourse community, we have to start here.

At any rate, in your blog, I want you to take some time to define the concept of discourse community based on reading Swales. Keep in mind that the concept of discourse community is NOT the same thing as the concept of primary audience. 

And then I want you to identify a group which might qualify as a discourse community based on Swales' six characteristics and analyze it based on those characteristics, just as he does for his After your analysis, do you still think this is a discourse community? 

And yeah. That's about it for now.
I hope you are having as good of a weekend as I am.