Discourse Community

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Pages: 6

The concept of a discourse community is something that is widely thought and argued about when debating about whether or not something is a discourse. A discourse as defined by Swales is, “Groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals”. I am a part of 4 different discourses and these are the discourse that define my life, beliefs, communication goals, and who I am as a person. My top 4 discourses would be Taco Bell (my job), My Family, My School, and Sign Language because these are all a huge part within my life. We are going to be looking within my discourses to decide on whether or not Gee and Swales would agree with whether or not this is a discourse community or just a pretender.
Discourse community
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This type of discourse is one where you are born into it without a choice and the only exit from this would be death. Because of death being the only way to leave this discourse I can finally say that I agree with both authors Gee and Swales because we as a family have certain speech communities that we are fully fluent in and we know that way that us as a discourse works. Gee famously believes that to leave a discourse it must be, “leave by death or other less involuntary ways.” At this point when it comes to family I completely agree with this statement that I would normally think is crazy because it works and it becomes the truth because there really is no other way to leave the family and even by death you still remain a part of it. Swales would without a doubt agree that a family is a discourse community because, “ there are common goals, participatory mechanisms, information exchange, community specific genres, a highly specialized terminology and a high general level of expertise” (224). In our family we know what right and wrong as well as our specific vocabulary and the appropriate way to use it like with “pop” or “granie and grampie” these kind of things are what make us our own tiny little