Reading Response 14

Swales – “The Concept of Discourse Community”

Summary

In his article, “The Concept of Discourse Community,” Swales attempts to explain to the reader the concept of the discourse community, and the various permutations that exist among the various scholars. He argues that there are differences between several different concepts and gives his criteria for what he calls a discourse community.

Synthesis

This piece isn’t really like much of the rest of the pieces we’ve read, even his intro piece we did. This is very organized and structure, like a couple of the more scientific pieces, but he jumps around too much to be compared to them. Same for the vice versa. His topic is similar to several others, but he takes his own, rather dry, angle so it’s hard to compare.

Pre-reading

I feel out of place whenever there are sports on television and I’m forced to stay in the room. This is because I don’t find sports to be entertaining or exciting like many of my male counterparts.

QD

5. A discourse community that I belong to is the one that contains followers of the Star Wars continuum. It is connected to all of its members through all of the different media, be it media, books, comic books, video games, ect. The main setters of the rules are George Lucas himself and Leland Chee, the Continuity Database Administrator. The goals are the expansion of the continuum and its maintenance. Because of the large number of authors in this discourse community, there is lots of different ideas, so lots of different material to bring to the table.

Thoughts

This piece was so boring the framing the reading section warned me that it was boring. If a frame of a piece of literature takes two pages just to sum up that the piece is boring, then maybe we should fine a more interesting piece that says the same thing, I’m sure there’s one out there somewhere, that’s what Google’s for.