After reading Swales’ piece I realized that a discourse community that I am part of would be my work places Facebook group. All of the employees are part of this closed group to communicate things regarding work. I can easily apply all six of the characteristics of discourse community to this group. The first characteristic is that the community has an agreed upon set of goals. In this case our group has the goal to create a connected work environment with good communication that provides exceptional care to patients. The second characteristic is that the community utilized mechanisms of communication, in this case we communicate via facebook posts, messenger and private text messages. This group primarily serves to provide information to its participants, meaning that it applies to the third concept of providing information and feedback. An example of this could be a facebook post proposing a new holiday rotation that requires feedback from its members.
This discourse community mainly utilizes the genre of facebook posts. Most posts are geared toward all of the community members and communicate using a casual tone. The fifth characteristic is that the group communicates using specific lexis. For this group where we are all nurses, we use certain terms and language to describe what we are talking about. The final characteristic is that there are members at all different experience levels. The members of the group changes regularly as new employees are added and others move on to other jobs.
When thinking of a discourse group I participated in but didn’t necessarily assimilated to, I think back to high school. As someone not really gifted in the athletic department, joining a sports team was difficult for me. I joined lacrosse when I was a junior in high school, all of the girls knew each other and got along they all understood the rules of the game. As someone new to the sport and sports in general I was sort of an outcast, struggling to understand how the game was played. After three or four weeks I decided lacrosse was not for me and that I would no longer be a member of that discourse group.
English Composition 
Hello I wanted to tell you that you made perfect sense out of something that could have been difficult to figure out. The way you broke down each of the six characteristics was easy to follow and understand. I would not have thought about the subject of your sports situation until reading your blog.
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I never would have thought of social media as a discourse community. Like your example and explanation
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I think both of your examples of a discourse community are very interesting and I felt that the last one especially was relatable for me. I personally am not very athletically inclined so I never fit into the “sport communities” very well either. I think the use of social media as a discourse community is very interesting because normally I would think of a community as an in person, face-to-face occurrence but Facebook functions just as well for that.
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I had a very similar experience but it was also somewhat opposite! I loved the people on the volleybal team, the girls were great- it was the coach that was horrid. I think your work’s communication is such a good way to utilize a tool most people use casually. I work in a pharmacy and wish we could communicate through a group text or a Snapchat platform so we could see who read the posts. Instead we just do face to face communicating which makes information spread slowly.
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