kaiserjr18's blog

There are six characteristics of a discourse community according to John Swales. In this blog I’ll be defining these six characteristics and finding examples of each from my own discourse community experience. The discourse community my examples will be coming from my milsim (Military Simulation) team that I was in during high school.

The first characteristic of a discourse community is that they have a set of public goals that may be formally agreed upon or more of an implied goal among the discourse community. The public goal of our team was to develop skills that could be applied both to the sport and in civilian defense as well as to educate the public of what milsim is by the use of a team website.

The second characteristic of a discourse community is that they have a communication system of some kind that connects all members. On our team we had a private forum on line that all members could use to communicate with each other to organize practices or announce upcoming events.

The third characteristic of a discourse community is that all members of a discourse community must participate in order to be considered part of the discourse community. In our team if you did not check the forum you were unaware of team practices and events, so without this participation our team couldn’t exist and we wouldn’t have a discourse community.

The fourth characteristic of a discourse community is that they needed at least one form of written communication in order to complete their goals. In order to complete our goals of making our team better and educating the public about our sport we used a forum to notify members of practices and had a website to help educate the public about us. Using these to forms of written communication helped us complete our goal.

The fifth characteristic of a discourse community is that they need to contain lexical items, such as abbreviations,  that are unique to the group and that outsiders don’t understand. In the milsim community there are many lexicons that we use to describe things that the public wouldn’t understand. Examples include AEG (Automatic Electric Gun) and GBB (Gas Blow Back) which are terms specific and unique to the milsim community.

The six characteristic of a discourse community is that they must contain a reasonable ratio of novice and expert members. On our team to make training successful we needed enough experienced players (gained through being a member for awhile or having prior military experience) to train the novice members. As well as enough novice members to keep the team running after the experienced players stop. If we didn’t have enough experienced members the novice members could be trained properly, and if we didn’t have enough novice members the team is in jeopardy of becoming nonexistent if too many experienced members leave the team.

A discourse community needs to include all of the following characteristics to function properly and to be know as a discourse community. If one characteristic is missing it affects all other characteristics and the discourse community fails due to how interdependent each characteristic is with the others.