at its most basic level a discourse Community is a group of people who share a goal and their communication or discourse is centered around achieving that goal however not all groups of people can be considered discourse communities according to John swales there are six characteristics that define a discourse Community before we discuss those it's important to note that you are all a part of different discourse communities already both formal and informal formal discourse communities can be workplaces academic groups or professional organizations for example teachers at a school doctors and nurses working at a medical practice or business Executives informal discourse communities can be social media groups online gaming communities or sports teams and fitness groups understanding the characteristics of different discourse commun communities can help us know how to act and write appropriately for different contexts and situations now on to the six characteristics these are covered in the last few pages of your reading if you want to reference them number one a discourse Community has a broadly agreed upon set of common public goals we might be tempted to say that all scientists are in a discourse Community however not all scientists share the same goals but groups of scientists do so for example a climate change scientists might be a part of a discourse Community where the shared goal is to understand and combat climate change number two a discourse Community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members this means that to be a part of a discourse community members must communicate or talk with one another in some way this communication can be spoken or written and it can be formal or informal different discourse communities will use different modes of communication but examples of these could be phone calls chat rooms text groups forums email social media spaces or informal settings things like boardrooms books journals and published articles number three a discourse Community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback this means that discourse communities must have a group of members that are actively communicating and working toward accomplishing their goals for example if you sign up for a club email list at Club Expo and you receive the emails but you never respond show up at the meetings or interact with other members then you are not a member of that Community there has to be enough members that do or that Community falls apart number four a discourse Community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its AIMS in this context a genre can be considered a text that is unique in some way to your community for example teachers use and create lesson plans business Executives use and create feasibility reports academic researchers use and create scholarly articles athletic trainers use and create treatment logs these also exist in informal communities skincare enthusiasts use makeup tutorials Quilters make and share sewing patterns Sports bers create and read score sheets genres of writing exist to fill the needs of different discourse community ities this is why there is usually a learning curve for writing in different genres number five in addition to owning genres a discourse Community has acquired some specific Lexus this means that discourse communities usually have some jargon or terminology that people outside of that Community wouldn't recognize or understand in business related communities people might use words like r I benchmarking kex which means capital expenditure or cash flow in educational communities you might hear words like IEP accreditation Blended learning or common core number six a discourse Community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise a discourse Community has to have a minimum amount of people with a minimum amount of knowledge about the discourse in other words if it's just you and two other people it might not count as a discourse Community there also has to be a number of both novices and experts for a discourse Community to survive so members must have a way of progressing from beginner to expert in order to keep the community going imagine if our political system consisted only of students from political science 1100 that's an exaggerated example but you get my point as we go on in the course we'll discuss some of these characteristics in more detail for right now think about some of the communities that you are a part of and try to figure out if and how they meet these characteristics in order to be considered a discourse community