Hopefully by now it’s clear how research is all around us and happening daily. However, if you tried to turn in your research about, say, affordable cell phone plans in a research writing class, your professor probably wouldn’t be very impressed. To understand why investigating cell phone plans doesn’t count as academic research, we need to consider the way that research takes place within discourse communities.

A garden club could be an example of a discourse community. If someone in the group told you to “deadhead the scabiosa,” would you know what they meant?

Discourse is a more technical way of referring to spoken or written communication. Thus, a discourse community is a group of people that is united by the way the members communicate and the things they communicate about. American linguist John Swales outlines six defining characteristics of a discourse community. Take a quick look at how Swales defines these six characteristics:

A discourse community:

1. has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.
2. has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.
3. uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.
4. utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.
5. in addition to owning genres, it has acquired some specific lexis.
6. has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. (Swales)

You may be looking at this list and scratching your head: “it has acquired some specific lexis”? “utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres”? What’s that supposed to mean? If you feel a bit left out by this list, you’re not alone! This list is written for a specific discourse community: academic experts in the field of writing education. For that reason, it uses words and ideas that might only make sense within the context of a particular academic field. Let’s translate this list into language for a wider audience:

A discourse community:

1. Has shared goals.
2. Has ways for the members to communicate with each other.
3. Exists mostly to share information among members.
4. Prefers to share information in certain ways.
5. Uses certain words in a group-specific way.
6. Has to have some members, but can’t include everyone.

You Belong to Many Discourse Communities

You are a member of many discourse communities right now, even if you don’t even know it. When you go to class or go to work and engage in conversations with your peers, you most likely are discussing something that you share in common with someone. Perhaps you are taking a history course that engages in discussions about current politics, or an education course that includes conversations around the importance of acknowledging diversity in the classroom. You are in a discourse community because you are involved in a community with shared goals, common interests, and you are now communicating (verbally) about those shared goals. The same can be said about an online gaming forum, a knitting group, a recreational sports team, or a place of work. If you work at a restaurant, for instance, you and your co-workers are working toward a goal to serve customers and trying to put out a good product. You will have to communicate with your co-workers in order to meet that goal, thus, you are in a discourse community.

One of the best ways to spot a discourse community is to look for unique or unusual language the members of this group share. How many of these phrases can you understand? Can you match the phrase to the discourse community that might say it?

Now think about any groups or communities are part of. Are certain words or phrases particular to this group? What shared values does the group hold? What qualities, credentials, or achievements are particularly important to this group?

For instance, take the discourse community of Twitter users. There are certainly phrases that are particular to this group– words that don’t mean much to people outside the discourse community: “SMH,” “TBH,” “wtv,” “Subtweet,” and so on. Twitter is too large a community to have shared political or social values, but one can make the argument that most Twitter users value the rapid exchange of ideas, a certain kind of cleverness, novel thoughts or opinions, and so on. And certainly the attention paid to “followers,” “re-tweets,” and “likes” speaks to the credentials or achievements that are important to the group.

Figure 1 below is a map of a discourse community around fitness. It’s pretty straightforward to imagine the shared goals and values of people interested in fitness. And there’s certainly a shared vocabulary of words like “cardio,” “HIIT,” “reps,” and so on. “Specialized genres” is a bit trickier to define. It means: are there particular means by which this community shares information?  To find an answer to this question, ask yourself: “How would someone new to this discourse community learn its shared language?” To learn the language of fitness, we can imagine taking classes, reading magazines, or even reading the instructional posters at the gym. These, then, are the specialized genres of that discourse community.

Figure 1. A discourse community map created for fitness.

Figure 2. You can fill in this blank map with your own discourse community