About this re-print:

I thought I had finished with the concept when I completed the Other Floors, Other Voices book (1988, Lawrence Erlbaum), and now being republished by the University of Michigan Press. There I had expanded and modified the criteria for “place discourse communities”. However, in 2013 I was asked to give a talk to the English department at Wake Forest University and the suggested topic was the concept of discourse community. Although I was a bit surprised that this old warhorse was being brought back for active duty, I agreed. When I started to look at what websites like Wikipedia and search engines like Google Scholar could produce on the subject, it became clear that the concept had had a resurgence because of the wide adoption of the Wardle & Downs textbook, Writing about Writing, and its inclusion of part of the discourse community section from Genre Analysis. In fact, that section of Genre Analysis had been written in the late 1980s, or nearly 30 years ago, and yet there were those six old criteria apparently having a remarkably extended shelf-life. So, I prepared a talk for Wake Forest, attempting to update the concept. Then, in 2015, Monique Memet, the editor of a bilingual journal called ASp, the official organ of the French association for English for academic and professional purposes, asked me to write an article on the topic for her journal. So, I essentially wrote up the Wake Forest slides, and that is what you will find below, reprinted with the permission of the editorial board of ASp.

Read on the Web

Read as a PDF

The Concept of Discourse Community from Composition Forum 37 (Fall 2017)
© Copyright 2017 John M. Swales.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.