The Concept Of Discourse Community Summary

A rhetorical analysis specially focuses on some rhetorical figures of the text. Frequently, there are many deep implications that the author had used to show how the arguments try to persuade the audiences. Many writers struggle with extending their ideas through the thesis statement toward to rhetorical analysis. In “The Concept Of Discourse Community”, John Swales had explained in details the concept of what he called a “discourse community.”

I have heard many people mentioned the phrase “community discourse” a few times before but I never understood this word in the exact way. Then the article of John Swales enlightened me that the discourse community is not just a group of random individual, instead they have their own rules to be set as

a discourse member. Throughout his literacy work, he skillfully used different rhetorical techniques in order to help the audience understand deeply the main point of this article.

To be honest, the topic is quite confusing and complex to read but Swales did a good job on outlining the meaning of a discourse community. In the manner of writing, structure plays an important role in keeping the readers interested long enough to read the whole article. That’s a reason why many authors use structure as a good way to touch the right chord of the audiences. He organized his reading into five different subheadings so that the readers can found it clarify to get his ideas. Each heading contains a thesis sentences that help to explain a brief note about this division of the chapter. By the way, the succinct statement also allow readers to get the brief summary whether they skims the text. Numbers were used by Swale as the part of the each segment, let us say, he separated coherently six different characteristics of the discourse community. It is also considered as a good way to organize and build the text so that the readers keep track of the situation. This listing method actually make each characteristic become special, rather than just combine everything together into one

paragraph. Moreover, readers get it easy to identify which idea is brought into focus based on its first or last numbering. It allows me to understand the nature of discourse community better when the six characteristics drew a rough sketch of the full meaning. The remarkable characteristic which stated “In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis”. This stood out the most to me because this simply refers to relate every social community has its own way of using unique words to communicate with members, or you can call it 'terminology'. Their linguistics deepens into their professional knowledge such as technical term, or community-specific abbreviations and acronyms. Artists community, for instance, have their different lexis used to explain tools, materials or techniques, etc. Sometimes you can find it difficult to understand every word they said if you're an outsider of this community.
Source is also a co-ordinate thing to notice for writers to incorporate all the comments of other prestigious authors as the additional foundation for their article.

Therefore, evaluating sources when doing the research is an important skill. One more time, Swales gets us to pay our attention to his work when he made it very cleverly and artistry. Usually he shared his ideas wanted his readers to consider initially, then he provided excerpts from the works of other authors – it can be a clear proof or an example, to strengthen the credibility of his statements. This attracted the attention of readers to believe that this is the masterpiece of John Swales which is sum up from many meticulous researches of other reputable writers supporting his

claims.
Throughout his article, Swale used a great diversity of sources. Consider, for instance, he listed many leading 'relativist' or 'social constructionist' thinkers who had affected his works. From that point, Swales implies that the discourse community can take many different kinds of definition depending on the circumstances and situations where you used. Swales would cite the entire paragraphs if this is a super important data sources. Those was Herzberg’s quotation that Swales had repeated word by word “Use of the term 'discourse community' testifies to the increasingly common assumption that discourse operates within conventions defined by communities, be they academic disciplines or social groups. The pedagogies associated with writing across the curriculum and academic English now use the notion of 'discourse communities' to signify a cluster of ideas: that language use in a group is a form of social behavior, that discourse is a means of maintaining and extending the group's knowledge and of initiating new members into the group, and that discourse is epistemic or constitutive of the group's knowledge”.
Another technique that Swales had enforced in his writing is applying the first person pronouns. He sets “I” to refer himself in order to make audiences have the similar thinking as him, to make them feel like the way he felt. Beside, the usage of “I” really help to define clearly his own points so that it is unnecessary to explain on reader’s aspect.