Discourse Community Ethnography Draft

Even though most people do not know what a discourse

community is, they are actually an everyday occurrence.
According to John Swales a discourse community is a group
of people who link up in order to pursue objectives prior to
socialization and solidarity. Now that you know what a
discourse community is, you are probably realizing that many
of the groups in which you participate meet this description, in
your workplace, in your school, in some academic or cultural
clubs, and many others. The reason I write this paper is to
inform the results of a research I conducted on two discourse
communities with the purpose of finding out how these
discourse communities use genre to communicate with their
members. The two discourse communities I analyzed for this
paper were the Rhetoric and Composition class and the
University Honors Council. Although these two discourse
communities did have some common aspects, the rhetorical
situations that they produced were very different. Before we
go on to analyzing these discourse communities, I would like
to give a brief summary of two sources that this work is based
on.
John Swales makes the effort to improve the definition of
discourse community. In works previous to his own, discourse
communities implied a cluster of ideas, which meant that a
discourse community is a group of individual that contributed
to each others knowledge on a common interest. Although
Swales agrees that this is true, he considers there should be
criteria to narrow down what is considered a discourse
community. The six criteria he proposes are the following:
1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of
common public goals.
2. A
discourse
community
has
mechanisms
of
intercommunication among its members.

3. A
discourse
community
uses
its
participatory
mechanisms primarily to provide information and
feedback.
4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one
or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its
aims.
5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has
acquired some specific lexis.
6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members
with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal
expertise.
Swales concludes by stating that although his definition
provides criteria to narrow down what can be considered a
discourse community, his definition is far from perfect,
because there were some aspects that he could not take into
consideration.
The article by Keith Grant-Davie has a similar purpose as
Swales. He intends to redefine what we know as rhetorical
situation. Previous to his work, there was much discussion
about the role that the rhetor played and what defined the
context and need for the rhetorical situation to take place. By
analyzing the existing definitions of rhetoric situation, he
makes his own definition, which states that rhetoric situation
is a set of factors whose interaction creates and controls a
discourse.
The set of factors is comprised of: exigence, rhetors,
audience, and constraints
Exigence is the topic, the reason why the rhetorical situation
exists and the purpose.
Rhetors are the individuals that are responsible for the
rhetorical situation

Audience is defined as the group of individuals with which the

rhetors try to negotiate through discourse to achieve their
objectives
Constraints are the factors that become present in the
rhetorical situation and can affect its outcome.

Now that we have introduced all of the concepts we will be

using for this research, I will begin describing my findings.
The first discourse community I will analyze is the Rhetoric
and Composition class. The exigence of this discourse
community is the need to have professionals that have good
writing skills and can communicate in an effective or even
persuasive manner. To reach this goal, the instructor of the
class uses various types of genres to have the students
contribute to each others knowledge, such as the essays,
lectures and the PowerPoint presentations she uses during the
meetings of the class. These genres are often used in a
repeating pattern. The lectures introduce the lexis and the
concepts to be discussed in the next class (discourse
community, rhetoric, ethos, rhetoric situation, etc).They are
also the base for the essays, where students write what they
understood about the lectures and what they thought about
the topics being discussed on the paper. The lectures are later
submitted to blackboard, where students may give feedback
on each others work through the comments. During class, the
rhetor is constantly changing from one person to the other,
but because each rhetor makes a contribution to the topic at
hand, it is easy to follow. The audience is formed by all the
other individuals besides the rhetor that is currently speaking.
Sometimes, the instructor will have the students converse
within a small group before beginning a class discussion.
During an interview, a student taking the Rhetoric and

Composition course states that it is necessary to read the

lectures and comprehend the key concepts to be able to fully
participate in the class. He considered there was little
difference between conversing with his small group and
conversing with the entire class. He finds that the genres used
during the class are actually very helpful and informative of
the topics to be discussed.

The University Honors Council is the representation of the

University Honors Program inside and outside UTEP. Their
common goal is to help each other develop as individual and
work towards getting leadership skills that can be used later in
life. They have two meetings each week where the officers
discuss upcoming events, such as fundraisers and community
service opportunities. The lexis used by this discourse
community is not as extensive as the Rhetoric class, although
they do have certain phrases have a certain meaning in the
honors council. What is your fire? is an example of one of
these phrases. For the UHC, this phrase signifies what motive
you have for doing anything you do and what must be done
for accomplishing that goal or motive that you are working for.
The UHC uses a variety of genres to inform its members, such
as mine tracker, Facebook, email, posters and flyers. The
officers of the UHC are almost always the rhetors that have
the task of informing the members of the upcoming events
because they are the ones who organize these events. During
an interview with one of the UHC officers, he confirmed that
the communication had always been tghat way since he was a
new member, although the officers are always listening for
suggestions.