John Swales As A Discourse Community
In our book, Writing About Writing, John Swales defines a discourse community as a group of individuals who share “a broadly agreed upon set of public goals” that use “mechanisms of intercommunication among its members” in order to achieve their objectives (795). I have chosen to examine how the College World, the Adrian College school paper, operates as a discourse community through the use of various mechanisms in order to solve the main issues that arise. More precisely, the research will explore how genres work within this particular discourse community in order to ensure that the writers are able to efficiently and productively distribute information to the Adrian College community. Beginning with the main issues within the community,
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In addition to this, the second problem Torrey noticed was the difficulty of communication between the editorial staff and other journalists. Being a newspaper, deadlines are incredibly crucial to achieving our goals, and articles that are turned in late or not at all can create tension and stress between members. If someone fails to do their assignment, or there are complications and the people are unable to meet for the interview, we need to be able to communicate quickly to solve problems before they grow. Although these two problems can be difficult to manage at time, the College World has three main mechanisms that help to ease the communication issues between staff members. Primarily google documents, emails, and group me are used by this discourse community to spread information to members of the staff. This can include important information such as story assignments, deadlines, events, and class meetings. According to Torrey, all of these genres are effective in some way or another, but some are much stronger than others in multiple aspects when it comes to solving the communication …show more content…
In addition to this, if the writers aren’t reminded to share their documents with the editors then there is no way of viewing what they have written or submitting it for that weeks issue. This can lead to complications since the articles written may be useless if the deadline is missed since the news covered that week may no longer be relevant by the next paper. Also, if an editor needs more information or to assign another story it is difficult to know if they checked their account or
In addition to this, the second problem Torrey noticed was the difficulty of communication between the editorial staff and other journalists. Being a newspaper, deadlines are incredibly crucial to achieving our goals, and articles that are turned in late or not at all can create tension and stress between members. If someone fails to do their assignment, or there are complications and the people are unable to meet for the interview, we need to be able to communicate quickly to solve problems before they grow. Although these two problems can be difficult to manage at time, the College World has three main mechanisms that help to ease the communication issues between staff members. Primarily google documents, emails, and group me are used by this discourse community to spread information to members of the staff. This can include important information such as story assignments, deadlines, events, and class meetings. According to Torrey, all of these genres are effective in some way or another, but some are much stronger than others in multiple aspects when it comes to solving the communication …show more content…
In addition to this, if the writers aren’t reminded to share their documents with the editors then there is no way of viewing what they have written or submitting it for that weeks issue. This can lead to complications since the articles written may be useless if the deadline is missed since the news covered that week may no longer be relevant by the next paper. Also, if an editor needs more information or to assign another story it is difficult to know if they checked their account or