Question 2. The central concept through which we have been critiquing documents

Question

Question 2.

The central concept through which we have been critiquing documents (or at least associating them for observation) is the idea of genre. We have used the term genre loosely to group documents that seem be situated similarly in terms of purpose and audience and in the context of the community in which the author (identity is the word we used) and audience are set. The Swales reading from early in the semester is quite deliberate in describing the properties of genre, however, and Swales would exclude a number of the documents we have looked at on the basis that the documents are not sufficiently intra-communal. Considering Swales’s definitions of genre and discourse community, how does our usage of these terms correspond to his? (To answer this question, you may want to begin by distilling Swales’s requirements for genre and discourse community and then proceed to discuss how each point he makes relates to discussions, resources, and activities from our weekly classes.)

Explanation / Answer

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary. Also, I have only talked about Swale’s views. You will have to write about your class discussions, resources and activities by yourself.

(Answer) Swales talked about social community and discourse community as two opposites. In a social community, the need for the conversation is to socialise and not to be particularly functional. In discourse community, it is a requirement that the discussion has importance because of the topic being discussed and not merely a discussion to socialise. In other words, discourse communities discuss things of importance that would probably lead to certain outcomes. For instance, doctors discussing a patient who is prepping for surgery would be a discourse community.

Swale’s does not talk too much about genre because he feels that it is self-explanatory. He has talked about it through an illustration. Swales said that a reader would be able to tell the difference in the rhetoric of a wedding invitation and a doctor’s note. Therefore, he says that “genre” is how the writers meet the rhetorical situation in which their work would function. In other words, he says that genre is the tone that is set based on the message to be delivered.

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