The Concept of Discourse Community

    The Concept of Discourse Community was definitely a tough analysis to understand. John Swales is definitely a very intellectual man with a vast vocabulary. He writes in a way that he thinks the reader is on the same page as him and that he has no need for deep explanation.
    Swales began to separate speech communities and discourse communities into two different categories. I was a bit confused as to how his first paragraph was separating the two of them but I believe he was saying with discourse communities, members were more likely to communicate in distant places rather than with speech from the past. His second definition for the social and discourse communities was a bit easier for me to understand. It seemed to be expressing that social communities were predominantly focusing on just a social standpoint while the discourse groups were more functional and focused on a set goal or objective. Thirdly, he defines a social group as one that gives the members just a general mold to fit into while the discourse communities give the members a broad taste of ways to learn and also will arrange them in skill levels and levels of teaching.
    As for what I got from his conceptualization of discourse communities, he described it fairly well, even though his vocabulary made it a little more difficult to understand. A discourse community tends to have common goals because the community is all seeking a goal as a unit instead of individuals. Also the group will have a specific acquired language that only they will understand. The group seems very open for feedback from its members and they want their members to be very well informed of the goals they are reaching. I feel like the group wants to also broaden their knowledge to things a little further outside of their specific talents and that the group will contain different skill levels at all times.