Discourse Community Essay

UTEP Blast: A Discourse Community
Khaleb King
University of Texas at El Paso UTEP Blast: A Discourse Community
Introduction
A Discourse Community is a group of people that share a set of goals or discourses and within this group, find ways to communicate about these set goals. Discourse Communities can mean having a spot on a sports team, being a part of a school club, and even your workplace can be considered a discourse community. To be accepted into a discourse community, one must seen as a credible source, one that has knowledge on the topic at hand and can help the group reach the goals of the discourse community. When joining a discourse community, it is important that one learns how those in the group use effective ways of communicating.
Members are usually held to certain standard regarding their contribution to the group. Those is the community provide vital feedback and information that is ultimately responsible for the growth of the group. In the following paper, I will discuss the discourse community of “UTEP Blast.”
Literature Review
In “The Concept of Discourse Community,” Swales begins by introducing speech community. Speech communities share information and knowledge regarding speech. He then explains how speech communities are built from accident or even adoption, while a discourse community uses experienced members to persuade and eventually train new members. Swales described six main characteristics of a discourse community. It is important to understand these six characteristics because they are used to describe any discourse community that you are analyzing. In Erik Borg’s “Discourse Community” peer review journal, there are some similarities as
Before starting this assignment and reading Swales and Borgs text on discourse communities, I had little to no knowledge of what they were. After the observation of UTEP Blast and comparing to what I had learned about discourse communities from my readings, I gained a great deal of knowledge. You can see that members of UTEP Blast were all motivated and wanted to help each other gain knowledge and succeed. That is what discourse communities are all about and it was a true experience being able to see this manifest itself in front of my own