A discourse community is a “group that has goals or purposes, and uses communication to achieve these goals” (John Swales). What does that mean? Like a sports team or a non-profit group or even the skateboarding community, a discourse community:
- has a broadly agreed set of common goals.
- shares specific values.
- has a specialized vocabulary.
- uses specific genres to communicate with its members.
- has a threshold of knowledge/skill that someone must meet in order to join the discourse community.
In other words, a DC is a group with shared goals, values, skills, language, and ways of communicating.
Of course, that raises a question about exclusion: how does somebody join one? How do its members regulate membership?
Here’s an example of how you might map a discourse community: DC example_1
And here’s how one high school student mapped a web of her own discourse communities: DC web