Discourse Community Analysis

A discourse community is a term defined in different ways by different authors. Swales' chapter "The concept of discourse community" tries to define discourse community more closely and to give some real-life examples. The first part of this piece of work I found to be exceptionally valuable because it broadened my understanding of the topic. Swales provided the overview what other authors said about discourse communities and what were their standpoint and examples, and how he agreed or disagreed or supplemented their thoughts and definitions.
Compared to other authors I have encountered writing about this issue, I find Swales' work the most helpful because in its section 2.3. He clearly states the criteria for classifying a community as a

The first is that a discourse community has broadly agreed set of common public goals, which means that they have a common interest or agenda with the emphasis on the word "public". The second criterion is that a discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. This relies on the fact that members of discourse communities use meetings, conferences, listservs etc. for exchanging information among them. The next criterion is an extension of the previous one, and it says that members use participatory mechanisms offered primarily to provide information and feedback, meaning that if participatory mechanisms are not used, members who do not use them they cannot be considered part of that discourse community. A discourse community also utilizes and possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, which means that communities like this usually have sets of rules or checklists that members use in their activities related to discourse community. The fifth criterion is very important and it underlines the fact that discourse communities have acquired specific lexis, i.e. language specialized and usually easily understandable only to the members of the discourse community. The last criterion somewhat extends from the previous one and states that a discourse community has members with a suitable degree or set of specific skills and

Namely, I was a member of a scientific student journal and society focused on publishing student research papers in the biomedical field. All six Swales' criteria could be applied to this situation. The society and journal had a website with the section devoted solely to the mission and purpose of the organization. The mission was to give students the chance to publish their work in the world where student research is hardly ever accepted in "big" journals of the field. To give students the high-quality medium for publishing their research and promote and support students in their research endeavors were our aims, all publicly available and clearly stated on the website. This fulfills the first criterion. Further, we had our internal listserv and Facebook group chat that we used for dispersing information among all members. Additionally, weekly internal meetings were a valuable mean of interconnecting and disseminating information relevant to the society and the journal. This fulfills the second criterion. Of course, everyone who ignored our meetings or tasks assigned to them, or who did not participate in our chat conversations, were excluded from the organization, which is the example of the third criterion. The fourth criterion is fulfilled in terms that we had a statute with set rules of how the organization operates