Discourses Community: Rough Draft #1
Becoming a part of discourse communities is human nature, and every human is a part of one. John Swales decided that a discourse community must “meet 6 defining criteria: there are common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genres, a highly specialized terminology and a high general level of expertise” (Swales 224). The main 6 properties define a discourse community, but in short, discourse communities are groups of people with the same goal and communicate to reach those goals. I personally am a part of two main discourse communities, the first being the Computer and Information Sciences discourse community, as well as the baseball discourse community. Although there are plenty of discourse communities I belong to, those two discourse communities will be the main focus throughout the essay. The Computer and Information Sciences discourse community and the baseball discourse community sometimes interfere with one another.
According to Linguist John Swales there are “sex defining characteristics that are necessary and sufficient for identifying a group of individuals as a discourse community” (Swales 220). The first defining characteristic is a common set of goals within a group, these goals don’t have to be written down, but all the goals are public. The second characteristic of discourse communities are the ways in which members communicate with one another. These forms of communication may vary from group to group, but all of them succeed in their own ways. The third characteristic is the ability for the group to provide information and feedback to the members of its group. This process allows every member of the discourse community to stay active and informed. The fourth property is the ability for the community to have multiple genres in the communicative furtherance of its goals. This may include having opinions on multiple different topics that don’t pertain to one another. The fifth property Swales described that a discourse community has it’s own vocabulary to communicate with one another. The final characteristic is that every member is qualified to be in the discourse community. This may include a college degree or some kind of criteria in order to become a part of that community (Swales 221-222).
The Computer and Information Science is my choice of major, and it is the first discourse community that I will be talking about that I am a part of. Computer and Information Science is two different, but very similar things itself. Computer Science is just the study of the principles of computers themselves, and the definition of information science is the study of storing and receiving information in computers. Those are two different subjects, but they go hand in hand when it comes to technology. Computer and Information Science is also a fairly recent subject of study, so it is still advancing at huge rates.
My second discourse community that I consider myself to be a part of is the baseball discourse community. Baseball has been in my life for a very long time, and I’ve always kept up with what has been going on in the sport. Baseball is an intriguing sport, and can be extremely hard to follow or understand at times. It’s a hard community to be a part of because it can be hard to keep up with the sport at times. Baseball can interfere with the computer science discourse community at times.
The Computer and information science discourse community is a generally new community, but the goals are very clear. The goals of this discourse community are to continue the development of the technological world. That goal has been the goal of computer scientists since this field was created. There are multiple steps to get to the main goal, and multiple sub goals that all computer information scientists strive to reach. Baseball’s main goals are to develop teamwork skills and develop social skills for people of all ages.