This PowerPoint presentation will help you identify and understand the key ideas from John Swales's "The Concept of Discourse Community."

1. Discourse Communities:
John Swales’s Six Key Characteristics (pp 466-79)

2. Gee’s “Discourses” versus
Swales’s “Discourse Communities
• John Swales establishes early on in his essay that he is going
to be talking about “discourse communities” as distinct from
“speech communities,” which are studied by sociologists,
anthropologists, and linguists.
• James Paul Gee’s essay from earlier in the semester discusses
the very broad idea of “Discourses,” which are a kind of
“identity kit” composed of the shared beliefs as well as the
shared communication styles that set people apart as
members of a group.
• Gee is looking at this broad category; Swales wishes to
discuss a particular subset within that larger category.

3. Speech Communities vs.
Discourse Communities
• Swales says that, even if we use a very narrow definition
of speech community (“shared linguistic forms, shared
regulative roles, and shared cultural concepts”), he
believes we still need a separate definition for “discourse
communities. Here are his reasons:

4. 1. Medium of
Communication
• Swales believes that the medium of writing has a couple
of affects on interactions of members in the group:
• Locality and parochiality are not as important in writing
as they are in speaking: they are more likely to
communicate with distant members of the group and
they are more likely to engage with writings from the
past

5. 2. Needs of Sociolinguist
vs. Sociorhetorical groups
• In speech communities (sociolinguistic), the needs of the
group dominate/determine the discourse.
• In discourse communities (sociorhetorical), the goals of
the group dominate/determine the discourse.

6. 3. Pulling Together vs.
Separating
• In society, speech communities are “centripetal” in that
they pull people together into the “general fabric” of the
group.
• Discouse communities, however, are “centrifugal” in that
they tend to separate people into occupational or special-
interest groups.
• A speech community inherits its members, while a
discourse community recruits its members based upon
their interests.

7. Six Characteristics
• Swales believes that there are six characteristics that are
“necessary and sufficient” for a group to qualify as a
“discourse community.” This means that you have to
meet all six characteristics (necessary) to qualify, but
those are the only characteristics you need to meet
(sufficient) in order to qualify as a discourse community.
• So, what are these six characteristics?

8. 1. A discourse community has a broadly
agreed upon set of public goals.
• The goals are public and may be written down or more
casually understood.
• The goals of the group are shared by all members. There
might be spies who join a group, but they aren’t true
members because they do not share the stated goals of the
group.
• Shared goals are not the same as shared areas of interest:
although they might be the same, they might also disagree.

9. 2. A discourse community has
mechanisms of communication among
its members.
• There must be some mechanism by which members
communicate with each other.
• You can have shared goals (all the cafe owners in a city
might share the goal of selling coffee and cheap food in a
similar way), but if they do not have a mechanism for
communicating amongst themselves, Swales argues that
they are not a discourse community. He asks how can we
assign them membership in a community they may not
believe exists?

10. 3. A discourse community uses its
participatory mechanisms primarily for
information and feedback.
• Information must be provided and consumed for true
membership in the discourse community. Also, it isn’t
enough to subscribe to a professional journal: if you don’t
read it, you aren’t a member of a discourse community.

11. 4. A discourse community uses
one or more genres of writing.
• The discourse community has distinct genres of
documents that it uses to achieve its goals. So, the topics,
form, functioning, and positioning of “discoursal
elements” within these documents is standardized within
the discourse community. These genres may be borrowed
from others discourse communities, but they must be
appropriated to fit the new discourse community’s goals.

12. 5. A discourse community
has a specific lexis.
• The discourse community has a specialized vocabulary
(lexis) that it uses to achieve its goals. These are terms that
are used within the community, but that might not be
understood by people outside the community: jargon.

13. 6. A discourse community has
a threshold level of members
• There have to be enough people to truly constitute a
community, a number below which the community can’t
function. Also, there have to be varying levels of
expertise. Old members must leave and new members
must join.

14. Hong Kong Study Circle
• Swales uses the Hong Kong Study Circle (HKSC) as an
example of a group that meets his six criteria for being a
discourse community. This group shares a common
interest in stamps from a certain period in Hong Kong,
and Swales makes clear how each of these criteria are met
by the group.
• Read through the example: does this make sense to you?
You’ll possibly be doing something similar in analyzing
your chosen discourse community.

15. work
cited
• Swales, John. “Rhetorical Strategies and
the Construction of Meaning.” Writing
about Writing: A College Reader, 2nd ed.
Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015. 466-
79. Print.