My Discourse Community

My discourse community is the joplin crusaders I think this is a good discourse community because I think it pretty much gives the definition of what a discourse community is. Wikipedia defines a discourse community as a group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. Linguist John Swales defined discourse communities as "groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals”. I think that the joplin crusaders have all of these characteristics to be a good discourse community to talk about in this essay.
When it comes down to discourse communities I am apart of many some of my favorite include the Religious aspect of my life and

the college I am apart of see we all are apart of something mine may be bigger or smaller than others but it's still a discourse community in the end and that's what counts. The discourse community I am going to talk about is the Football team that i mentioned in the beginning of my essay. I am on the joplin crusaders and the main reason this is a discourse community is because we are like a family we all work together to achieve one goal and that is to win. I love being apart of this discourse community because it is amazing too see a bunch of guys who don’t know each other come together and work as one. Discourse communities is a cool word because if you look closely at it you see the word unity which is what we are we are united as one to accomplish the goal of winning. The main reason I wanna talk about this discourse community and why I picked this discourse community is because I think it shows the best of what a discourse community is about it is about working as a team to get to your goal and this shows that. Making a discourse community is harder than it actually looks because if one of the ingredients is gone then it will not work or be a discourse community. If the football team I am apart of just decided they did not wanna win anymore than it wouldn't be a discourse community anymore because we wouldn't share a common goal.
My discourse community isn’t perfect though if you look closely at all discourse communities there are some problems. I think there are conflicts in my discourse community like for instance if someone misses a play in a game we all get mad at that one guy who missed the play and it kinda throws off our whole goal of winning. We have a lot of conflicts inside our community besides that one though if someone aka one of the players makes us run more we tend to turn against them which is a big conflict because at that point we all aren't a unity. By us having conflict like this I think it hurts our community a little bit because we kinda forget the common goal we all share which makes it a lot harder to accomplish it.
When I look at my discourse community I think for the most part it is a pretty well put together community.

Some members of my discourse community do have difficulty to fit in. For instance some players are not as skilled as me or some of the other players so they get very jealous or mad and sometimes even try to hard and miss a play and get hurt which can be catastrophic to my discourse community. I believe every single discourse community has some people who struggle to fit in but it is all about overcoming adversity. In my discourse community if someone is not as talented as the rest of the team then we practice extra hard with that person to get them somewhat closer to where we want them to be so they can fit in a little more. But that person has to be willing to wanna get better for the discourse community to work and that's the biggest issue or difficulty with the whole thing. I think if you get down and think about it deep everyone in my discourse community has difficulties sometimes and some more than others that's true. But everyone will miss a play or mess up and make the goal harder to achieve. I think that is some of the difficulties we all

experience.
In my discourse community we are all equal but you have to have some authority to keep things in order. My coach would be the leader because he tells us what to do and how to do it. If we do not listen he gets mad and tells us to run as discipline but in reality we are all equal in my opinion. I think the coach gets his authority from years of experience that we as a team do not posses the coach or leader in my discourse community knows a lot more than what we do because he has been around a lot longer than us and has seen a lot more that is why he is the leader of this discourse community. The leader of our discourse community plays a huge role because without him we would be in shambles. We need our coach to keep us not only organized but to keep us as one so we function together to achieve our goal of winning.
I think one of the biggest issues of my discourse community and i'm sure this is true about many others too is that people have a hard time to enculture quickly.

This is so hard for people in my discourse community because not all of us came from a football background for example I came from a football background I grew up on football always loved it but some people on our team did not even start watching it till two years prior. I think that is how people failed the hardest in my discourse community when it comes to enculturalization. In my discourse community there is always a way to succeed though we help each other and teach each other especially people who haven't lived and breathed football the football basics. By doing this it helps people succeed rather than fail and that is how we win games by making people succeed rather than failing because anyone can succeed but nobody has the right to fail at least not on my watch I will do everything in my power to help the people in my discourse community to

succeed.
I think my discourse community is successful due to all of these things but I think teamwork plays a huge role in making it all happen. To have a good working discourse community you must have unity and that transpires to success every time. It does not matter if your community is small or big if you work together to achieve a goal you will always come out on top as a well oiled discourse community.