Project 3 Intro/Conversation

            Discourse communities; a community of people who congregate in order to discuss specific goals and learn about specific things based on which community they are a part of. John Swales, an American linguist, proposed six rules that communities must meet in order to be called a discourse community. These rules are that the group must have a set of common goals, methods of intercommunication among its members, use the methods of communication to spread information, utilizes one or more genres in order to grow as a community, has specific acquired lexis and has a threshold level of members with suitable relevant content to contribute.

            The use of discourse communities helps us understand how writing and language work together with social groups when studied. When we look at specific discourse communities we can understand the six rules they follow. More specifically when it comes to writing and language the acquired lexis of a discourse community can give us insight into the communities writing style. Some discourse communities seem to have their own language, or with Reddit, the discourse community I am studying, have a sort of ‘inside joke’ style of communicating. With the intercommunication aspect of Reddit you can see how their language almost works as a combined writing experience. Someone will comment on a thread and a comment can either be written onto that comment or onto the parent comment/thread before. This creates an almost essay formatted kind of thread.

            John Swales, as stated earlier, is a very important person when it comes to defining what a discourse community is due to his six main rules. Although Swales is a big name when it comes to discourse communities, his is not the only name that comes to mind. Elizabeth Wardle expanded on the idea of discourse communities. She uses the concept of ‘Identity” and gives three ‘modes of belonging’ for individuals. These modes are Engagement, Imagination, and Alignment. The first two seem to explain themselves by their titles, but alignment is a bit different. Alignment is a concept that means to be able to come to common ground with others sometimes resulting in the destruction of an individual’s identity. There is an article written by Devitt et al titles “Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities”. In this article Devitt et al, dig deeper into the idea of genres within discourse communities. They argue that genres are used for organization within the discourse community. Without these genres there would be a whole lot of information to sort through seeing as there are no genres (I think you can see genres as sub-sections of the community).
            Some ways that I believe that my ethnography could add to this conversation is that I can look further into genres by explaining ‘subreddits’. Subreddits are a great way to view genres and explore them in comparison to each other (other genres). I will also be able to expand on Swales’ six rules of discourse communities because I feel as if Reddit is very open in that all the information is easily accessed due to its use of genres and lexis and the fact that I have been using Reddit for quite sometime now.