John Swales' Discourse Communities

Within this excerpt from his accredited book Genre Analysis, John Swales explains the concept of what he calls a “discourse community.” While conceptualizing his definition of a discourse community, Swales proposes six characteristics that he considers to be necessary and sufficient for indentifying a group of people as a discourse community. His definitions and my understandings of them follow:

1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.---
Whether formal or informal, goals are set by the discourse community that highlights its values, morals, expectations, beliefs, and aspirations.
2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.---
Discourse communities have mediums or environments of communication that they frequently use in order to relay messages between its members.
3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.---
Technology and print sources, such as newspapers, magazines, and books that interest the discourse community’s goals, provide the discourse community ways of obtaining information and sharing back their input.
4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.---
Due to values and opinions of groupings within discourse communities and continuously changing values of the original discourse community, these individuals constantly adapt and expand their expectations.
5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis. ---
Discourse communities have their own vocabulary, as distinct as its grammar, that isolates the community from outsiders and provides information between members.
6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. ---
Depending on a reasonable ratio between novices and experts, discourse communities are constantly experiencing shifts of members as people die, leave, or grow older and grow wiser.