Nursing Discourse Community Paper

Charmaine Garcia

Ms. Stone

ENC1102

10, September 2015

Literate Activities inside the Nursing Community

Nursing is definitely a great discourse community. But you’re probably wondering, what is a discourse community? Well John Swales, who is a professor of linguistics and co-director of the Michigan corpus of Academic Spoken English at the University of Michigan, wrote a book called “Genre Analysis” that explained what discourse community is and the characteristics for identifying what takes part as a discourse community. Swales defines discourse community as centrifugal; In other words, it tends to separate people into occupational or specialty-interest groups (Swales, John. “Genre Analysis” Writing about Writing. Wardle, et al. 220). So basically he’s saying that it is a group of people who communicate about similar interests that they have in common with each other. With that said, Nursing does count as a discourse community because it’s a field of people who share similar interests, value, and goals in their lives. Discourse communities takes place all around the world and plays an important role in communication. There is no way others can understand others without the use

of communication.
As a child, there were so many things that I imagined in doing and becoming that it was hard to choose, but with years in deciding and socializing with my family, It lead me on the right path.

Socializing with my family was like a learning/storytelling session. Like how Eli, his siblings, Sr. and the Fisher family, from the article “Becoming Literate: A Lesson from the Amish” written by Andrea Fishman, did many literate activities like storytelling, reading books, and playing games with each other. The more Eli got to participate in the family activities, he felt more confident in himself. That’s how I felt. I felt that after spending time with my family, and them telling me stories about their past and careers, made me feel better about myself and confident in going to college for

nursing.
When people like other college students, ask me what my major is, or something along those lines, and I say nursing, I feel like the first thing that comes to mind when I say nursing, is money. Yes, being a nurse does come with a lot of dead presidents, but it is more than just that. It is the same with saying that Mechanical Engineers has good salary too, but that’s not the whole purpose of someone becoming a Mechanical Engineer. Nurses are essential to patient care, and they play a major role in promoting health, limiting diseases, and helping patients manage their illness. It takes a lot of determination, motivation, and interest in the process to become a nurse. It also requires a lot of literate activities, as well as to communicating with others.
From the states of being a nursing pending student to becoming a registered nurse, communication is everywhere. Texts likes textbooks, journals, syllabi’s, and papers that are assigned, are used as a student to ensure that all literate activities and assignments will be done and that concepts will be understood clearer, is communication. Nurses use many different types of texts that influences communication in their discourse community. The types of text that they most use are tables and charts, which are the basis of mostly all information that are being received by the nurses. Whether it’s from temperature, to blood pressure, or the type of medication that is being prescribed, all the information will be in charts or tables. It was a way to keep organized, and to allow other nurses to easily read and understand all the information.
Another form of text they use is text messaging. Text messaging has become a more faster and efficient way to communicate with others in the facilities today. Some nursing facilities still uses handwritten charts and tables, but with the advance in technology, the use of text messaging and computers/monitors have become a lot more handier, quicker, and easier to use.