Brian Fratto CAL 103 8/30
The Concept of Discourse Communities
In section 2.2 of the excerpt, John Swales discusses what he believes to be the key differences between speech communities and discourse communities. He states that discourse communities are a "sociorhetorical" as apposed to "sociolinguistic", insinuating that speech communities develop in order to satisfy certain social needs, while a discourse community is developed for more altruistic reasons. From this distinction, Swales goes on to define the 6 characteristics of a discourse community, all which seem to reinforce this statement. According to Swales, "a discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals." He makes the distinction that these goals are public to assist his assertion that discourse communities act towards the development of the group or a certain field as opposed to personal gain. Swales gives the example of the Hong Kong Study Circle, a group which was created to create interest and advance knowledge of postal systems and services in Hong Kong. Swales describes the conventions used to categorize the items that have been acquired or targeted by the group. A "picture postcard" is marked as "1899 Combination PPC to Europe Franked CIP 4 C canc large CANTON dollar chop, pair HK 2 C Carmine added & Hong Kong index b dcs. Arr cds. (1) (Photo) HK $1500." To the average eye, this set of words and abbreviations might seem indecipherable and pointless. However, to an expert collector, this terminology might make information that was once tedious and difficult to express much more concise and useful. Similarly, many terms and expressions have been coined by discourse communities due to the fact that many concepts and procedures cannot be expressed using simple terms. A relevant example is the idea of "discourse communities". The term was created by people like John Swales, linguists who analyze certain groups and occurrences that might not even be recognizable to the average person. John Swales uses this term in his writing to express his findings to people who are of the same discourse community, a task that would have been more difficult without this particular phrase.
