My Discourse Community

My discourse community that I chose is law. I chose this direction because law is something I’m passionate about. Whether it be defending the rights of an individual, or an entire business, this is something I see worth doing. Sometime this year, I met a friend that shared his passion for law with me. He chose law because of the fifth amendment, stating, “everyone has the right to not self-incriminate oneself. For example, when the government knows you have a document that is self-incriminating, they can subpoena that document and you would have to hand it over. A subpoena means a write ordering, or summoning someone. However, if the individual had to self-incriminate themselves to get the document, they wouldn’t have to turn it over to the
While Swales, introduced discourse communities in general. Discourse communities are focused on two main components: lexis and genre. Lexis is the use of language in a discourse community (Swales 216). However, it is important to note that every community has “developed their own [versions] for genres” because of rhetorical needs through recurring situations (Swales 216). In the workplace finding what is appropriate and necessary is what troubles many. Lucille McCarthy, in “A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing Across the Curriculum” highlights the complex writing process in what a discourse course community wants and how we need give it to them. Lucille McCarthy believes writing to be a social activity by using the communication means considered appropriate by members. For example, if I were to work for the Wall Street Journal, I would be taking my writing very seriously because that is what my job is founded on. Discourse communities differ from what is deemed appropriate because the norms shift from one discourse to another. Another example of this is Sean Branick; he uses the concept of football as his literacy. He focuses on the five coaching aspects: goals, developing relationships, developing solution focus, managing process, and achieving desired outcome. He uses Swales discourse community characteristics to better define the process of the football community.
The first characteristic for a discourse community is having agreed on a set of common public goals. For a lawyer, that could be defending the rights of citizens for any given circumstance, or public safety. There are numerous goals in the political grand scheme of things. Secondly, a discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. These are usually participatory mechanisms that vary among a community. For law, this means communicating by meetings, email, text messages, and so forth. Practicing attorney, Chris Reed, said that “the best thing one can do is communicate effectively, by meeting them face to face and observing how they are feeling and making their clients know what is especially important, and allowing their client to fully understand the gravity of the situation being discussed”. The third characteristic uses participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback (Swales 221). This is fitting to the law community because Mr. Reed said “… the purpose is to teach and educate them” so they know why this decision was made and what, if anything, can be done about it. The fourth characteristic “utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communication furtherance of its aims” (Swales