In Swales’ article titled, The Concept of Discourse Community, in the initial framing of the reading, the last paragraph on the first page says, “Discourse community is the first of two frames for analysis that this chapter provides in order to help you consider how people use texts and language to accomplish work together.” I think that’s just a fancy way of saying that, just like genres, discourse or speech communities are different ways of categorizing groups of people who evaluate media of all kinds, be it video, audio, research, poetry, etc.
The same paragraph then says that Swales gives us things to look for and consider in order to figure out what’s happening in different situations involving texts and language. To me, that summary of what Swales does in this article basically means we will want to analyze our audience when creating a text or language in order to reach them most effectively; that we will want to match the form of our discourse (genre) to the audience it is intended for. That explains to me why we are going so deeply into these topics of genre and discourse community.
I think of genre as a system of grouping devised to help people categorize whatever medium they are talking about. I guess you would kind of have to know what is appropriate to put things in the correct category, or at least the most appropriate one.
I was struck by the following part of Dirk’s essay: “When people write, they draw on the genres they know, their own context of genres, to help construct their rhetorical action. If they encounter a situation new to them, it is the genres they have acquired in the past that they can use to shape their new action. Every genre they acquire, then, expands their genre repertoire and simultaneously shapes how they might view new situations. (Devitt, Writing 203)” I think this is a good example of why I read that to be a successful writer, you need to be a voracious reader. I would just add to that recommendation that the reading needs to be varied so you continue to learn and develop as a writer.
This is so true. I spent so many years as a court reporter reading nothing but legalese that I tend to think in that “genre” now. It’s what I know and I’m comfortable with it. I need to remember that the vast majority of the population is not. Thinking about it now, I realize that there were different genres within that “legal discourse community” and even separate discourse communities under the umbrella of the judicial system.
I substituted in different courtrooms at different times in my career, and there was a completely different vocabulary in the different types of law. Civil trials were completely different than criminal trials and there was also different communities in the family law courts and the juvenile law courts. Then I moved to Michigan and found that the discourse was different here compared to California.
And within the court reporting community there were also different discourse communities: reporters who worked in court, with their various sub-communities; reporters who worked as deposition or hearing reporters, and reporters who worked as captioners, which was broken down into realtime or live captioning and captioning that is added later. There was even different sub-groups amongst the deposition reporters, like workers’ compensation depositions, expert testimony depositions, general civil depositions, medical malpractice and accident reconstruction, accounting and engineering — I could go on and on breaking down each into circles that overlap others in different ways.
I never really thought about where genres came from or who made the “rules” for different writing genres either. But it wasn’t that many years ago that there was no social media, so that was a new genre that people had to come up with a genre to go with it. And Twitter was a whole new genre itself, even though it was social media. I notice that some of it is common sense, which isn’t all that common, but besides the practical reasons for certain practices when using Twitter, it’s interesting trying to figure out who the people were or are that kind of set the tone for its use.
On the second page, second paragraph, it explains that “genres are types of texts that are recognizable to readers and writers”… and “meet the needs of the rhetorical situations in which they function.” That is what Dirk basically said.
The 3rd paragraph says that “genres develop over time in response to recurring rhetorical needs.” I wasn’t so sure about that statement but this is basically what Dirk said, too.
Swales shows how different discourse communities all have genres that even people outside the community recognize. That makes sense to me when I think about groups like Special Ops or Navy SEALS or something. I don’t understand their speech or discourse, but I recognize it when I see it.
The last paragraph of the intro says that, “It might be helpful to think of genres as textual tools used by groups of people as they work toward their desired ends; genres and the conventions that guide them change as the community discovers more efficient adaptations, as group membership changes, or as the group’s desired ends change.”
Trying to break that down, I thought of changes in style, like MLA or APA or changes in accepted spellings, like “website” or “web site,” etc. I didn’t think there would be that much change, but I realized that it is true, although the changes seem to move slowly. They do point out that new technologies help make the analysis and dissemination of the information more efficient, which is also something I’ve noticed. I think new technologies also help create new genres and discourse and speech communities that never existed in the past, too.
While I have questions about some of his criteria for what constitutes a speech or discourse community, he does say in the second paragraph of section 2.1 that “the relevant point in the present context is that it has been appropriated by the ‘social perspectivists’ for their variously applied purposes in writing research. It is this use that I wish to explore and in turn appropriate.” Swales then quotes a few different people’s definitions of discourse community before he admits that we need to clarify what should be understood as discourse community, and he says: “it is better to offer a set of criteria sufficiently narrow that it will eliminate many of the marginal, blurred and controversial contenders.”(216) I definitely concur in that.
He continues to lay out his process for determining what the “list of criteria” should constitute. I think Dirk’s explanation of her thoughts was much easier to understand, but he does manage to get the point across, which is then demonstrated in the list of six criteria that he came up with.
On page 219, section 2.2, he lists several peoples’ definitions of a speech community and quotes Hymes who gives multiple criteria: a community sharing knowledge of rules for conduct and interpretation of speech that must comprise both 1. knowledge of at least one form of speech, and 2. knowledge also of its patterns of use.
I think his attempts to clarify the difference between speech and discourse communities is rather long and unnecessary. He could have just said that speech communities are a concept used by sociolinguistics and discourse communities are focused on the written rather than spoken communication (219).
On page 220, he gives a second reason for separating the two concepts: distinguishing a sociolinguistic grouping from a sociorhetorical one. He also says that speech community determinants are social, whereas discourse community determinants are functional, with common objectives outside of social reasons.
“In a discourse community, the communicative needs of the goals tend to predominate in the development and maintenance of its discoursal characteristics” (Swales 220).
He then gives a third reason to differentiat between speech and discourse communities: “In terms of the fabric of society, speech communities…tend to absorb people into that general fabric, whereas discourse communities…tend to separate people into occupational or specialty-interest groups). A speech community typically inherits its membership by birth, accident or adoption; a discourse community recruits its members by persuasion, training or relevant qualification.”
I thought that was a very insightful observation. I had to think about groups, trying to see if that could be applied across the board, and I couldn’t think of any that didn’t fit the criteria, although he did say “tend to” so he wasn’t rigid about it.
When he goes on to list his six defining characteristics, I was surprised by some of his comments. In his first criteria, he says …”much more typical non-adversarial discourse community, reduction in the broad level of agreement may fall to a point where communication breaks down and the discourse community splits. It is the commonality of goal, not shared object of study that is criterial, even if the former often subsumes the latter.”
I liked his example of a Vatican discourse community—it may be a common object of study, but the students can be from different groups and not form a community. His examples of Vatican history students, the Kremlin, dioceses, birth control agencies, and liberation theology seminaries made this statement very clear.
His fourth criteria is that “a discourse comm. utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims”(221). He says, “a discourse community has developed and continues to develop discoursal expectations. These may involve appropriacy of topics, the form, function and positioning of discoursal elements, and the roles texts play in the operation of the discourse community.”
From my interpretation of Dirk’s essay on genre, the form he is talking about is the accepted genres in that community. I wasn’t so sure this criteria was true—it’s hard to envision a discourse community “possessing” a genre. But then he quotes Martin, explaining, “In so far as ‘genres are how things get done, when language is used to accomplish them’, these discoursal expectations are created by the genres that articulate the operations of the discourse community”(221-222).
He goes on to say new discourse comm’s need to sit down and figure out their practices, and I don’t think that is necessarily true. So I understand this to mean that genres are the framework of different discourse communities, acting as the expected form of communications for the group.
After he goes through his example of the Hong Kong Postal group he is in, he gives a much shorter list of the six criteria: “There are common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genres, a highly specialized terminology and a high general level of expertise.” He also explains that “distance between members geographically, ethnically and socially presumably means that they do not form a speech community.”
See how he considers genres to be one of the things that discourse communities have in common? After this information, he goes into the remaining issues that need to be addressed. He rephrases the last one in Bizzell’s terms:
Discourse community is a group of people who share certain language-using practices that can be seen as conventionalized in two ways: stylistic conventions regulate social interactions within the group and in dealing with outsiders. To this extent “discourse community” borrows from sociolinguistic’s idea of “speech community” (224).
“Also, canonical knowledge regulates the world-views of group members, how they interpret experience; to this extent ‘discourse community’ borrows from the literary-critical concept of “interpretive community” (225).
Here is where I have to disagree with Bizzell. Swales’ example of undercover agents who don’t assimilate into their communities is demonstrative. Swales also disagrees with this idea and says, “the extent to which discourse is constitutive of world-view would seem to be a matter of investigation rather than assumption,” stating he doesn’t accept assimilation of world view or a threshold level of personal involvement as criterial. I agree with Swales’ opinion that delineating these variable features sheds an interesting light on the whole study of contextual writing.
In his conclusion, Swales gives us a final disclaimer: “It is necessary to concede that the account I have provided of discourse community for all its attempts to offer a set of pragmatic and operational criteria, remains in at least one sense somewhat removed from reality. It is utopian and ‘oddly free of many of the tensions, discontinuities and conflicts in the sorts of talk and writing that go on every day in the classrooms and departments of an actual university (Harris)” (Swales 227). He even quotes the dissembling of some of the other experts he quoted in the paper and claims that conflictive discourse communities need to be studied.
I personally don’t see the need for studying conflictual communities because I can’t fathom the “experts” ever coming to a consensus. Look at how long the Israelis and the Arabs have been fighting–even the Palestinian diplomat I met in Ramallah said he doubts they will never get along.
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