Discourse Communities Pt I

Swales defines discourse communities based on a combination of

six different characteristics. While it may be difficult for one specific
community to demonstrate every characteristic, we can identify
discourse communities to certain extents if they only agree with some
of the requirements. The first example that came to mind when
introduced to the concept was Greek organizations at colleges.
Whether they are professional fraternities and sororities or social ones,
they all have a clear cut set of goals, unique lexis and genres for
communication as well as a varying group of members. These features
legitimize this group as a discourse community.
One fraternity, Sigma Phi Epsilon at UCSB, has an agreed set of
common public goals (Swales, 471) including building balanced
men. This goal is further elaborated upon to express the
organizations interest in preparing students with the necessary skills
to flourish in the outside world. Additionally, these types of institutions
usually aim to positively contribute to their local community and to
improve their own reputation. Although those goals may seem informal
and irrelevant, they do in fact justify their classification as a discourse
community because all members of the group are inclined to
collaborate and work together to achieve their objectives.
This collaboration comes with means of intercommunication,
which may be seen in a variety of ways depending mostly on the

purpose of communication and the members who belong to it. Just as a

more formal society would likely use professional means to
communicate such as emails or memos, fraternities and sororities
would use more informal locales such as group texts and social media
which are more in line with the groups informal objectives and the age
group of its member. By taking advantage of these platforms, the
fraternities are able to communicate amongst themselves promptly
and effectively allowing them to react to different circumstances and
ensure they perform well to achieve their desired goals. To clarify,
Greek organizations tend to put together philanthropy events to raise
money or awareness and having coherent means of communication is
fundamental to keeping everything in line and ensuring everything
goes as planned whether that means having an itinerary for the events
or instructing someone to refill the punch bowl, it all plays a role in
enhancing the guests experience which is a stepping stone to realize
their goals.
While itineraries and instructions are examples of genres used,
there are several others such as; Facebook events, texts, fund raising
platforms and bids. While some of these may seem conventional, they
are all done in forms that would usually only be understood by
members of the community. In addition to the foreign genres such as
bids, these are really just invitations delivered to new members to join
the community. The repeated need for such a document developed

into a genre exclusive to the group. Bids are also a great example of
lexicon, which is another way to distinguish discourse communities
from one another. Even though most of the fraternitys lexis is simply
just made up of abbreviations there are also slang words that the
community members will be a lot more comfortable using that others.
Some examples include: PC pledge class, TG themed gathering and
social an exclusive event between two Greek organizations. Again, it
is obvious that the word social is part of most peoples vocabulary
however; in this case it was just developed and extended to better suit
the specific genres used by the group members. Just because none of
these terms are complete jargon does not mean that they are not
lexical since their use is largely restricted to the communities
themselves.
Moreover, these groups do have recognized novices and experts,
which further reinforces their establishment as a discourse community,
since there are constantly people joining on one hand and others
graduating on the other. This allows the experts; usually seniors in
college, to further familiarize the newbies with the appropriate lexis,
traditions and genres. This helps preserve the community and
exclusivity of the group, without such ratios the group would either
stagnate due to a lack of outside perspective or lose its essence if the
traditions and so forth were to cease to be passed.

The importance of intercommunity communication is highlighted

here, showing that just like most establishments there are certain
protocols that have to be followed if they are to succeed in achieving
their goals. Obviously a weak link in the line of communication would
heavily weigh everyone down and present further difficulty in
achieving the desired goals. Literacy not only allows these goals to
remain realistic, it also help the community grow and develop by
promoting it and increasing influence, more people tend to work their
way into the community which in turn further helps them prosper. It
cannot be stressed enough how vital literacy is to the whole system
from top to bottom, communication is key especially since success is
only achieved through qualitative means, the message that is sent out
has to be well put together and delivered to ensure the group benefits
accordingly.