I have been a member of a discourse community ever since my fall semester freshman year when I decided to join a fraternity. Joining a fraternity was one of the best decisions of my life, as it has granted me access to a community held together by brotherly love, communication, and the hierarchy of expertise and seniority.
The first characteristic of a discourse community, a widely accepted set of public goals, is evident in our fraternity because every member has joined for similar reasons and is communicated to by the executive board about the organization's goals and objectives. Some of these goals can include a certain amount of money we want to raise for a philanthropy event, such as the American cancer Society's relay for life or a clothing drive for the salvation army. There are also many goals that are agreed upon by the chapter as whole, such as how many new members we want to recruit in the coming semester or will be elected to certain positions.
Our chapter uses a variety of communication methods to keep everyone in the chapter connected and able to speak to every member at once. The most useful and powerful mode of communication is email. We have to main email groups, one for jokes and stories that members know everyone will enjoy, and another group for official business such as meetings, community service events and important announcements. There is also a chapter meeting every week, which is an open forum for members to voice compliments, complaints or share new ideas. This also ties in with the third characteristic of a discourse community, because the chapter as a whole will get feedback from the executive board about what the chapter is doing well and what needs improvement.
Besides emails and chapter meetings, every member has access to several Gmail documents that contain information about all current members. This can be accessed by anyone at anytime and contains such information as major, year, email address and phone number. This allows a chair holder to quickly reach out to individual members of a committee or team to learn progress of a project or hold a meeting, thus furthering the goals of the chapter and fulfilling the fourth characteristic of a discourse community.
Our chapter has a somewhat stereotypical lexis that everyone in the chapter enjoys using. Everyone really does try to incorporate "bro" and "frat" in everyday language and any variation of words or names that incorporate bro are greatly appreciated, such as "brohemians", "brotastic", "fratio" and my personal favorite, "frattire". There are of course, hundreds of terms and phrases that are unique to our chapter and I could type for hours about them all, but that would start to become excessive. However, I hope you all do not judge me too hard for my "frattitude".
Th final characteristic of a discourse community is the hierarchy of seniority in the chapter. The seniors obviously command the greatest respect in the chapter because they are in their final year of college and have done a lot to improve the chapter in their tenure as a member of the fraternity. Likewise, freshman are expected to show the most respect because they are new members to the organization. I believe it would also be very apparent to outsiders who the more senior members are in the organization because of their comfort level while interacting with other members of the organization, including their tone of voice and the amount of lexis (bro speak) they use in their dialogue.
I am also in the same fraternity, but since this kid wrote this before me I wasn't going to write two blogs about the same thing. I will however, comment on it! After all the discussions from class about the communication that makes up a discourse community, I found the idea that there is a varying degree of expertise in each discourse community very fascinating. While it is extremely easy to identify seniority or leadership, like members of the Executive Board each chapter elects, in a fraternity where a developmental process is in place, the hierarchy is not as apparent in all social circles. While there may be members of a group of friends that possess more leadership or command more respect, but I do not feel like there is always a degree of expertise that is developed throughout the discourse communities existence. This is all just based on my interpretation of the sixth characteristic explained by Swales. Let me know if you interpret it differently.
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