The definition of a discourse community is, “a group of people who share a common set of values, beliefs, and goals, and communicate to achieve them.” Discourse communities are all around us, and you might even be in one but have no idea. They can consist of clubs, jobs, even sports fans. But what distinguishes discourse communities from other groups, and how do you know if you’re in one? According to John Swales and “Writing @ Saint Leo University”, one of the main factors in a discourse community is the shared set of goals within everyone in the community. Not only are these goals private and kept within the community, but they are public for everyone to see. These goals help to unite together, and also on the public aspect of it, get more people to join them with the same goal. Another main factor of a discourse community is intercommunication between them. This can be done through the use of emails, texts, announcements, and any other forms of communication. Lastly, two important factors in a discourse community are genre and lexis. Lexis is very important in a community because it is a separate set of words or phrases that people inside the discourse community use to communicate with one another, almost like “inside jokes”, according to “Saint Leo University”. And genre is a typified response to a recurring rhetorical situation. An example of genre would be our weekly agenda slides that list our assignments and homework. This helps us understand and get to the goal of our discourse community in this class, to pass the class, complete all assignments, and to have a further understanding of English College Composition. Achieving and identifying all of these factors can help you determine if you are part of a discourse community, and can even help you create your own community with others. After learning what are the key components of a discourse community, we are then able to identify if we are in any discourse communities in our lives. One discourse community that I have realized I was a part of was my previous job working at Chick-Fil-A. Chick-Fil-A was its own community aside from other fast food jobs, because they have a shared set of goals to create the best service, they have a specific type of lexis when communicating to one another, and also experts and non-experts which would be the different job positions. My experience with this discourse community has taught me many different skills and helped me to me more developed, especially since this was my first job that I began working at, at just 15 years old.
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