Discourse Community testifies to the increasingly common assumption that

discourse operates within conventions defined by communities, be they academic

disiplines or social groups (Herzberg, 1986,1, 217). A discourse community is more
than a common lexis, rules, and shared cultural concepts. John Swales has a Ph.D in
writing and he spent most of his career in linguistics. Swales provides us with six
characteristics to look for and reflect on when trying to decipher what is happening
in any situation where language and texts are combined.
A Discourse community ahs a broadly agreed set of common goals, has
mechanisms if intercommunication among its members, uses its participatory
mechanism primarily to provide information and feedback, utilizes and possesses
one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, acquired some
specific lexis, and a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant
content and discoursal expertise (Swales 220-222). The goals can be written in
documents or can be implied; they can be high-level goals or more theoretical.
Communication mechanisms will differ as specified to the community. People in a
discourse community interact with common people, create, receive, and reply to the
same kind of messages for the same purposes, and have a similar range of genre
skills. They need to keep up with informational opportunities to continuously strive
to improve the common goal. Genre is a text that helps further communication
between people in the discourse community, each genre uses a specific lexis
depending on the community. In each discourse community there are specialized
lexical items that are used that differentiate one discourse community from another
because people in a discourse community will be able to recognize and understand

the lexis. People enter discourse communities as a student and stay depending on
their expertise in the community.
Writing About Writing is a discourse community within itself. The writers
that compose this book have common goal to understand writers and their writing
process. Anne Lamotta profound writer, paid attention to the fact that all writers,
professional and beginners, write a shitty first draft as the beginning of their writing
process (Lamott, 528-531). Mike Rose studied writers who experience writers
block and writers who are not affected with writers block and what process they go
through to produce a text (Rose, 532). Paul Prior focused on how text come into
being and where the texts come from that are being produced (Prior, 492-523). The
writers in this book interact with other writers and with participants in their studies
of figuring out the writer process. Sondra Pearl preformed studies along with Paul
Prior, Christina Hass, and Linda flower. They may never interact with one another
but they communicate with different people in order to reach a common goal.
Writers share their studies with other writers who then duplicate their studies or go
into further research of what they are studying. Matsushashi gives us an analysis of
videotaped recording of participants writing and other researchers have used or
created settings where people have recorded participants writing like Kamberelis
de la Luna and Syverson to learn about the conditions of composing a text (Prior
519). Developing discourses involved the appropriacy of topics, the form, function
and positioning of discoursal elements, and the roles the texts play in the operation
of the discourse community (Swales, 223). Writing About Writing is the genre for
the discourse community. Their articles are presented in here allowing the authors

to see what they have written. This discourse community uses their own lexis that a
person out of the discourse community would not understand. Discourse
community, intertextuality, think-aloud protocol, exigence, and rhetorica are just
some of the lexis that people who study writing would comprehend and outsiders
would struggle understanding these words. The writers in this book entered
discourse community when they started to learn about writing in schooling. They
became experts in this discourse community when they received their degrees in
writing, learning, or have written many books about the process of studying writing.
Understanding what a discourse community is, will help me in my
professional life. I will be apart of the medical discourse community because I will
understand the common goal of helping people get better. In the medical field
professionals communicate with other professionals about the same patient for
background information. The genres we use to communicate will be through
medical records, books, and articles of studies that similar professionals have
researched. Knowing the lexis will allow me to communicate with people in the
discourse community. People who are not in the disoucrse community, such as
patients will not understand and I will have to use different lexis when I am with
patients and when I am with associates. Everyone in my Discourse community will
have a degree in math and science. We will all be trained professionals, but some
with have high degrees and more experience.

Works Cited
John Swales, The Concept of Discourse Community, Writing About Writing,
Wardle & Downs, 215-227
Anne Lamott, Shitty First Drafts, Writing About Writing, Wardle & Downs,
527-531
Mike Rose, Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A
Cognitivist Analysis of Writers Block, Writing About Writing, Wardle & Downs, 532545
Paul Prior, Tracing Process: How Texts Come Into Being, Writing About
Writing, Wardle & Downs, 492-523
Sondra Pearl, The Composing Process of Unskilled College Writers, Writing
About Writing, Wardle & Downs, 615-639
Christina Hass and Linda Flower, Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the
Construction of Reading, Writing About Writing, Wardle & Downs, 410-427