Understanding Discourse Communities

In an attempt to summarize the information given by Swales, Melzer lists what makes a discourse community and, like Swales, explains his personal involvement in a discourse community. Discourse communities, as explained by both writers, must include at least six characteristics. Those characteristics being: a broadly agreed upon common goal or goals, a mechanism for communication between members of the discourse community, a way to provide feedback to other members of that discourse community, one or more genres that help further the goals of the discourse community, a specific lexis or specified language, and a threshold of expert members or an expert member. Melzer connects these to his personal experience and explains why these characteristics are so important to discourse communities and adds personal context to the definitions and explanations given by Swales in his article. I found this very helpful and I believe I was able to better relate it to discourse communities in my own life using Melzer’s examples. While it can be hard to find and understand discourse communities I found that these articles very eloquently explain what they are, and each article, especially Melzer’s, can help the reader comprehend what makes a discourse community and further understand the discourse communities they have been in.