Quote 1: “The basic idea of a rhetorical discourse community arose in contrast to the longer-standing sociolinguistic concept of speech community. The latter was premised on a homogeneous assemblage of people who share place, background, language variety and who largely share social, religious, and cultural values.”
Response: This quote is a little confusing to me because I don’t understand if Swales means that the people from different places and background is what makes a community. I believe Swales is explaining that these homogenous people do make a community but I’m not fully grasping what he’s explaining.
Quote 2: “Fine, but we now need to emphasize the roles of new digital channels, such as emails, blogs, tweets, etc., and we also need to stress that without any means of intercommunication of any kind, there is no real community. Subscribers to Le Monde may share certain characteristics, but they do not form a discourse community.”
Response: I agree with this quote because this is the era of technology and everyone uses technology either to reach out to family or for any other use. Everything we do we must use technology because our economy relies on technology.
My first discourse community would be my family because we all try to work together and try to communicate with each other to reach the same goals and happiness in life. My family helps shape me into the person I am today. Though, I and my family get into arguments all the time I believe those arguments help me become a stronger person and it teaches me lessons about myself.
My second discourse community would be my job because the communication is great and everyone at my job learns from each other either its a mistake we’ve made or a real-life problem. my job also helped me build on my communication skills because usually, I can be a very quiet person when introduced to a new environment.
My third discourse community would be my friends. My friends helped me become a stronger person and we all share the same goals in life. without them, I don’t think ill get this far in my life.
Your two quotes are actually related. DCs do not need to be of the same place and background, etc and technology actually facilitates this.
As for your DCs, you need to be more detailed. Where do your families beliefs, values, ways of communicating, etc come from? These are probably DCs. Same with friends what is it you all have in common? Interests? Major? And can you say for each DC what some of the characteristics are for that group? Things to think about as you move forward with unit 1.