Student Example English 1010-E03 Prof. D MARK March 17, 2016 Helping a Community Attain a Healthy and Beautiful Smile: A Discourse Community Analysis of a Dental Office The modern definition of health was created for the Constitution of the World Health Organization and signed on July 22, 1946. The definition claims, "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity" (100). Based on this concept, dentistry is a branch of medicine that is involved in the study, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of diseases and disorders of the oral cavity and the adjacent structures and tissues. This dental treatment is carried out by a dentist and her dental team. Success of a dental private practice relies on effective communication between staff members and their ability to share common goals. Consistent observation, analyses of documents like board publications and reports, and interviews with the office’s staff members reveal that the dental private practice of Dove Family Dentistry (DFD) is a discourse community according to Swales’s six characteristics. Summary of Swales’s Characteristics John Swales is a professor of linguistics and co-director of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English at the University of Michigan. He says that in order for a group of people to be a discourse community they have to share six characteristics. The first of these is that “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common goals. These public goals may be formally inscribed in documents, or they may be more tacit” (Swales 220). This means that the members of the group all work for the same goal, even if that goal is not written down somewhere. For example, in football ( Example 1 ) and many other sports, each team member knows that the ultimate goal is to score more points than the opposing team. The second characteristic proclaims, “A discourse community has mechanisms of communication among its members” (221). This means that the people inside a discourse community are able to communicate with one another. For example, inside a law office, people communicate through meetings, telecommunications, newsletters, and conversational. The third characteristic builds on the second, exposing the idea that “A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback” (221). Here, Swales is talking about the content of the ways the group communicates. In a workplace, for instance, information is given in meetings and feedback comes in the form of addressing the issues discussed in those meetings. The consecutive characteristic states that “A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims” (221). This proves how genres articulate the operations of discourse communities. The genre is the channel through which the information travels. For example, inside the discourse community of the.