Discourse Community Essay Examples

A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. Linguist John Swales defined discourse communities as "groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals.

The defining characteristics of a discourse community might be
1) commonality of interest,
2) mechanisms for intercommunication between members,
3) survival by providing information and feedback,
4) development of genre-specific discoursal expectations,
5) possession of an embedded dynamic towards an increasingly shared and specialized terminology
6) a critical mass of members with a suitable degree of relevant discoursal and content expertise.