Orlando Galan Blog #5

Hello and good evening everyone! What’s going on. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend class on Monday, so I am sure I missed out on important material discussed about the new topic concept mentioned in the email. Anyway, I thought the best way to make up for it is to read Swales article and see what I understand from it. The reason I say it like that is because this topic doesn’t really seem like the material I typically am interested in and read lol, so please bear with me. The conceptualization of discourse community gave me the realization that a lot of research and observation was involved. To come up with such material must of took a lot of hard work, so I must give Swales props for that. I would like to talk about one of the six characteristics of a discourse community, the first one. I always try to come up with my own examples because it helps me better understand the material. The first characteristic is saying that a discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. I feel like us, college students are agreed to a set of common public goals. We arn’t necessarily a club or association like the reading says, but we are a school which consists of many individuals with a purpose or goal. Our goals are public. We are all attending SDSU because we want to increase the level of knowledge and receive an education so that we can better succeed in life. Anyone can come in to our school and realize that our purpose or goal is to receive an education. However, our individual goals remain private. I would also like to talk about the second characteristic of discourse community. The article uses the example of a café owner will most likely belong best in a social group who involves people who are likely to become café owners in their neighborhood. I again would like to relate this characteristic to school. For example, one’s major is a discourse community that has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. As a communication major, I would best share social class with other comm majors, or even professors or comm organizations that are taken in the comm building. I probably wouldn’t have much of a mechanism of intercommunication with let’s say, a science major. The topics are related enough to build a social class. The third characteristic uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. The best way for me to remember this characteristic is to relate it to teacher or peer reviews. If a student has completed a project or research paper, the student will typically take in to someone in the same community with knowledge in order to receive professional information and feedback, to further improve the assignment. In such a case, it is important for someone with a lot of knowledge in the same community as yours to be the one to give you info or feedback, usually because its from a credible source. The fourth characteristic says that a discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. The title for this one confused me at first, but after analyzing the content, I understood it! For simplification, I just thought of this characteristic as it stating that every community has a certain way of being and its certain goals. Again, as comm majors lol, we all like to communicate and socialize and most of our aims after graduation involve getting a job where we can apply our communication skills and make a living out of something we are passionate about. The fifth characteristic, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis, I would say just goes into further detail of the specifics a community has. In my example, communication studies has its own terminology that differentiates its material to other majors. Of course, the terminology is specific and most of the time, only comm majors would understand. This is what makes a community unique. Its something that isn’t known or taught just anywhere. Finally the last characteristic! Haha. A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. Sound complicated right? Well this characteristic had the smallest explanation actually, however it seemed a bit sad. It simply states that discourse communities have changing memberships weather its death or in other less involuntary ways. But in order for the community to survive, it needs to depend on a reasonable ratio between novices and experts. Im not gonna use death for my personal example, but instead use the positive example or graduation. Students graduate and leave. However it obviously doesn’t mean the communication major is done. Its survival is guaranteed due to new students studying the field of communication!