Annotations of “The Concept of Community Discourse” by John Swales
- The writer is John Swales, he has spent most of his career in linguistics working with nonnative speakers of english.
- Genres are types of texts that are recognizable to readers and writers, and that meet the needs of the rhetorical situations in which they function.
- Discourse community, the first of three terms to be examined. It is to be ‘the center of a set of ideas’.
- A speech community was seen as being composed of those who share similar linguistic rules.
- Discoursed communities are centrifugal (they tend to separate people into occupational or speciality-interest groups.
- Overall, the intent to which discourse is constitutive of world-view would seem to be a matter of investigation rather then assumption.
- The next issue to be addressed in this section is whether certain groupings, including academic classes, constitute discourse communities.
- Bizzell (1987) has claimed that discourse communities can be healthy and yet contain contradictions; and Herrington (1989) continues to describe composition researches as a ‘community’ while unveiling the tensions and divisions within a group.
Annotations of “Discourses: How Do Communities Shape Writing?”
- Discourses are group members’ shared “ways of being in the world”.
- When a group of people shares goals or purposes and uses communication to achieve them, we can call that group a discourse community.
- Communities of practice is another name for discourse communities.
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