There are many different types of discourse communities all around the world. The discourse
communities that my group and I will be discussing are: Athletics, Majors, and Family/Friends. My group
members are Antonio, Estefania, and Mariah. We chose these discourse communities because all of us
belong to them.
The audiences in the communities that we have chosen are professors, family members and
teammates/friends we play sports with. We communicate in different ways with each group. In the
Athletics discourse community the subject that is commonly discussed is, speaking with other athletes
about sports. Conversing about our favorite sport or athletic team is another common subject to talk
about. Being a part of the athletic discourse community is great and on the up side, it is extremely
healthy. “So we’ll be meeting in the library dude.” are phrases discussed between friends and family.
When a family member or a friend is close to you, you tend to speak to them in a slang type of
conversation. This happens because of the trust you build up with them. Subjects that are commonly
discussed in Majors are talking to professors, writing e-mails, and using blackboard. These are subject
that are commonly discussed in the discourse community.
The purpose of writing in the discourse community is to point out and differentiate one
community from the other. This will educate you on the good and bad things about certain discourse
communities that are out there and that we are part of and don’t realize it. Cell phones,
e-mails, blackboard, and TV’s are all examples of media used in the communities. Living in the 21st
century means there are so many ways to communicate through technology. Having technology is the
reason why communicating through Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram makes talking about our discourse
communities with our audience easier. Genres used by the members of the communities are our
genders and where we belong in a sense. Most guys in the athletic community play rough sports, such as
football. Mariah and Estefania have different genres such as dancing or cycling. The genres are just
simply the categories that we fall into among our discourse community.
Conventions that are used in our academic discourse community are e-mails, blackboard, and
simply face-to-face communication (conferences). This is how we get in contact with our mentors and
professors in our majors. The different convention is simply speaking to different major professors, and
about what we speak. In the business major you talk mostly about entrepreneurs and supply/demand.
“You have the right to remain silent…” is a form of speaking in the criminal justice major. In nursing you
really emphasize medical terminology and patient symptoms. Means to communicate among our majors
are via e-mails, text, and meetings. Similar topics discussed are dealing with people, the privacy act, and
of course reading and writing are very essential to all our majors. Being in this discourse community is
very important because having a major and having different genres about your majors really show that
everyone is trying to succeed.
“Mijo vete a traer la leche de la tienda” is common language used with our family/friends
because we are all Hispanic, most of our mother and fathers speak Spanish and they speak to us in
Spanish as well. When we speak to our friend we tend to not really care about our language or our
verbal grammar. “s#*t bro you aint gonna believe that stuff that’s been happening to me”. When an by
stander hears us talk among our friends they have no clue about what we just said to eachother. We
learn these words and slang amongst each other, thus the reason we speak to one another like that.
Very common topics between family/friends revolve around drama that goes on in our lives. Humans
have a big tendency to just babble and talk about drama in this specific community. Note that talking in
the academic community is very professional and very educated. Conventions in the Family/Friends
community is just the simple mean of building relationships with the loves ones, the only difference that
we have is that we all have different parents.
Becoming members of these discourse communities is not that difficult. For example to be part
of a social media community you have an e-mail and create a facebook account. With doing that you
automatically become part of the social media discourse community. Making friends sometimes can be
hard but once you do you immediately become part of a group that shares your same interests. To be
apart of the family discourse community you must be born into or marry into that group. Sometimes
when you say, “I’m part of this discourse community”, it sounds really important. It sounds like you had
to go through some kind of initiation to be involved, but that is not the case. Many people are part of
communities that they don’t even have any idea. For example everyone who goes to school becomes of
the school discourse community and a lot of kids don’t even like school, yet they still make part of this
community. The way that discourse communities differ from one another is they are simple there based
on what makes them. For example social media and sports are two completely different things.
Although people are part of both, just like myself, the communities are very different.
Being part of a discourse community is a good way to learn who you really are or better in what
you want to become. The term discourse community is just a way to generalize people and their
interests. My team and I are part of these communities and we just love all three of them. Learning
about the discourse communities really opened my eyes personally about what kind of person I am and
who I want to become in life.