Stripping discourse communities down to its' essentials, the whole concept is a relation of those inside the community--or to outsiders--that share the same communications, beliefs, and purpose toward a sense of a shared understanding of an overall goal. The range of this concept even extends within the members inside the communities, where the majority of members share similar practices, ideas, interests, personalities, and plans with one another. So as the members come together, the community will then focus on a subject each person have specific thought patterns. With these patterns, the communities can differ on the subject, whenever the dependency is focused on a quest for enlightenment of a writing topic, or gossip towards a infamous pop star a lot of the members the community agrees on. Therefore, the sophistication of words chosen to express the subject--the language, grammar syntax, and discipline--will differ from one community to another. Yet, no matter on how wide the age, class, or education an individual receives, one rule stands above all else within each of those communities, which revolves around understanding the principles and applying that for the benefit of the community at large. Basically, if someone wants to join a club and feel like they belong to that specific club, the individual has to pay attention on how the community speaks to one another, how they express their thoughts towards a subject matter within that community, and be aware of the relationship of each member and their beliefs with those principles.
But like the various communities that deal with different assumptions of separate duties, different writers have different interpretations on how to fulfill on what exactly a discourse community is, mostly commented by professors who specializes in English. John Swales, writer of "The Concept of Discourse Community," notices many different interpretations of a discourse community--one involves on how it relates with the evolution of speech communities--and as a response to each, he creates his own version into six characteristics: public goals, intercommunication, information, genres, specific lexis, and members of dicoursal expertise (Writing About Writing, 471-473). With these characteristics, members of each discourse can vary in number, resulting in individuals belonging in different communities on their level of interest (476).
James Paul Gee, writer of "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics", however, believes that individuals cannot be recognized as a member of a Discourse, or "saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations," unless a center conflict of those members and the individual form for the purposes of that community (484). As such, different levels of Discourse communities--dominant Discourses and nondominant Discourses--brings different members at different levels of mastery, further demanding the conflicts into battles of greater importance to the community if the individual has his way, resulting in members never outright being a pure member of a Discourse fully.
Amy Devitt, Anis Bawarshi, and Mary Reiff, the writers for "Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities," meanwhile, looks at analyses based on genre that results in a conflict of a nonmember and the community over a specific topic. This conflict can which range from voting on a ballot, judging words with court members, a Patient Medical History Form, or researching ethnography--studying a community by using material within, such as text, composition, and language--to figure out what genre can do to further extend on a technique that can contribute to the matters in some way.
Getting away from techniques, Elizabeth Wardle, the writer of "Identify, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces," looks into different discourses with the construct of an individual's thought pattern. Using a theory from theorist David Russell, she writes that the individual has to go through modes of belonging--engagement, imagination, and alignment-- to participate within many communities, resulting a conflict of the individual who wanted something out of the community than what the group that forms the community did want (523-524). Using a specialist to further expand on that conflict, Wardle uses the subject to further expand on her thoughts of an individual being an authority figure, the rebellion against those who do have that figure, and the identities formed by that person, and those within the community, to figure out why learning inside discourse communities involves more than relying the thought patterns of an individual, leading towards more involvement towards the community's process to be enculturated as a fully realized member, or risk not being one at all.
With these discourse community theories, I plan to look into my own family and figure out if being an offspring of members inside that particular community has any effect to the conversation the writers have in regards to discourse community. Does the offspring have responsibilities nonmembers do not have to worry about at all? Has the thought pattern of an individual within that community have any overall say in the state of the discourse once it grows up, or is is forever determined by an authority before a certain age and becomes obsolete when a member grows up? Is being an offspring of members allow looser restricts to the principles that form the community, or is it even more strict, knowing that the responsibility looms that member into submission of authority? Using the theories, along with doing some research, such as looking into emails or text written by each member, I will find out if that is indeed the case, classifying it as a unique discourse community, or find out that I do not have the enculturation needed to be a member of that community.
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