In Dan Melzer’s, “Understanding Discourse Communities” he further explains John Swales’ definition of a discourse community. John Swales had described a discourse community as “A broadly agreed upon set of common public goals, mechanisms of intercommunication among members, use of these communication mechanisms to provide information and feedback, one or more genres that help further the goals of the discourse community, a specific lexis (specialized language), a threshold level of expert members (24-26)” Then, Melzer used his own example of his monthly guitar jam group as a discourse community for him. He goes into detail about how his guitar jam group met all of the requirements of being a discourse community.
This helped me realize that the groups I’m in aren’t discourse communities for two main reasons. The first being that the online groups I am currently in don’t have a specific lexis. The second being that the groups I’m currently in don’t have a threshold level of expert memebers. All of the members within the two online groups I’m a part of on Discord and Instagram are strictly in the groups to gve each other feedback on works that we’ve written, a shared goal of receiving feedback and improving our work, the genre we use is sharing our work within the group chat to get feedback on our works, and we communicate through Instagram and Discord group chats. But because neither group meets the other two criteria they don’t qualify as discourse communties.
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