Project 3 Intro and Synthesize

Nicholas Kollert

English 1510

Project 3 discourse communities

November 1, 2012 

Project 3

Intro

            Have you ever been part of a fan club, an organization, or a certain group? If yes, then more then likely you have taken part in or have been in a discourse community. A discourse community by definition is a group of communicators with a common goal or interest that adopts certain preferred ways of participating in public discussion. A discourse community has several guidelines that qualify them as actually being a discourse community. Stated by John Swales there are six qualifications that make discourse communities actual discourse communities and they are they have a broad set of common public goals, they have mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, they provide information and feedback, they possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, they have also acquired some specific lexis or terminology, and finally they have a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discourse expertise.  With some many guidelines it can be hard for someone to figure out if they’re actually in a discourse community, but in reality it’s pretty much any group or organization that is pretty organized. Threw my research I was able to find a couple discourse communities that interested me and that I also belonged to, but the discourse community I choose was the discourse community of Pittsburgh Steelers fans. I choose to research The Steelers Fan discourse in depth because not only am I a member of this community but I have also been a fan since I was a little child. Overall I plan to go in depth with my findings on this certain discourse community to show all the qualities it possesses and to go in depth into it.

Synthesize

I chose to write about The Pittsburgh Steelers Fan discourse community because it’s a discourse community I find interests in and it can fit into the six categories mentioned by swales that make a discourse community what it is. The first category that this discourse community fits into is that they all share a public goal to support the Steelers and to always win the super bowl each year, but that always doesn’t happen. The second qualification that labels this discourse community is that there are places for members of this discourse community to share their ideas and thoughts with each other on places such as blogs and forums dedicated to spared the word and thoughts of all people in this certain discourse community. The third qualifications that labels this as a discourse community is that they use mechanisms to provide information to the public and this community does this by putting up information about the team and other things related to the organization on websites, newspapers, or even magazines. The fourth thing the qualifies this group as a discourse community is that they take into account for other genres in order to further it aims and this community does this by incorporating different kinds of media such as magazines, video, and the internet to help convey the message of Steeler supporting. The fifth thing that qualifies this as a discourse community is that members of this community use specific terminology when talking to each other, just threw the little research I did I found certain words used to describe the Steelers and certain slang terms used to describe them too. And finally the last thing that qualifies this group as a discourse community is that they real only accept a person with a background or someone who has knowledge in the area of the certain discourse community. I found examples of this on their web pages that if someone posted something false or something that didn’t follow what they were supporting then they would take it down or comment on it pretty much bashing the false poster. Over all I plan to go more in depth into each topic to prove that my discourse community is a legitimate one and to get more in depth into what makes it a discourse community.