Swales & Porter on Discourse Communities

Swales & Porter on discourse communities

By James Barker
UTEP RWS 1301 online

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Swales
The topic of a discourse community has been debated for many years by various scholars
alike. However, no point of view has been as controversial as that of the scholars Swales, and
Porter. Swales Believed that in order for a community to qualify as a discourse community it had
to meet most of his six characteristics if not all of them. Swales Characteristics are as follows "A
discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals" (Swales, 1990, p. 220)..
"A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members" (Swales,
1990, p. 221).. "A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide
information and feedback" (Swales, 1990, p. 221), "A discourse community utilizes and hence
possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims" (Swales, 1990,
p.221), "In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis"
(Swales, 1990, p.222), "A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable
degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise" (Swales, 1990, p.222). In short what
Swales meant by this is that in order for a community to become a discourse community The
community must achieve a level of sufficiency in which all the members included must therefore
share common goals, have methods to communicate amongst themselves, provide regulatory
feedback amongst themselves and also have the means to achieve their goals. Next we shall
establish what porter deems as a discourse community. However, first we must discuss what
porter means by intertextuality as he uses it to describe discourse communities, when poter
describes something as intertextual he means that the idea or ideas themselves are not original as
they derive from something else or perhaps rely on another set of ideas to clarify itself. Now as
to refer to what porter deems as a discourse community porter states that a discourse community
is a group of individuals bound by the same intrests bound by approved channels and whose

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discourse is regulated (porter 400 ),he then goes on to say the rules may be more or less
apparent or more or less institutionalized ,more or less specific to each community(porter 400) .
He also goes on to basically say a discourse community shares ideas on what ideas are
appropriate, what are not appropriate and can also regulate what is right or wrong due to the fact
that every member generally agrees on the same values. He then concludes by saying that a
discourse community can either be ethos- well developed, it can be pre-paradigm -no established
leader and ill-defined system of regulations or it can even have competing functions and
boundaries that are not defined within itself. After this he explained that after all is said and done
the community works to disprove the material existence of discourse itself. You may find
yourself asking what exactly does Porter mean by this well simply put porter means a discourse
community is a group of people that have common goals and can agree on what is proper
improper and how exactly to go about disproving things. With this being said we will now take a
look at both Porters an Swales definitions of what a discourse community and see how they
stack up with each other.
We shall start with the similarities, what is agreed upon by both Swales and Porter if you
will. Both agreed on the fact that they share common values or interests, they also shared the
beliefs that a discourse community approves whats right and wrong, and also have ways of
communicating amongst themselves. Now as far as similar defining terms go those are the main
points. We now must look forward and see where they disagree Porter says that a discourse
community is always looking to disprove its material existence, whereas Swales mentions
nothing of the sort. Porter also goes on to say that there are three different types of D.C one being
ethos an etc. While Swales on the other hand has a loose interpretation of the matter and does not
go as far as to go in that.