Swales and the Discourse Community: Brief Description of Rhetoric

In “The Concept of a Discourse Community”, Swales writes and defends his points in a logical manner. First, he establishes a brief background with surrounding, relevant context of his discussion about discourse communities, by specifically naming several people who have attempted to define a discourse community. In doing so, Swales also characterizes the current state of the discussion by introducing the fact that people before him, like Herzberg and Porter, have conceded that a definitional problem exists for the concept of the discourse community. Swales makes use of this introduction to his rhetorical advantage, because the lack of definition seamlessly transitions into the need for clarification, which is essentially the point of his essay. By indicating a gap of understanding in a concept that appears to be fundamental, i.e. the concept of a discourse community, he appeals to his audience to read further into his essay, so that they might discover a definition of a term that is central to their field of study. 

One of the major ways in which Swales establishes his niche is by describing the purpose of defining a discourse community. He accomplishes this by contrasting a discourse community with a speech community, since these two concepts are sometimes mistaken for the same thing. He states that these two concepts need to be separated because of the need to differentiate between “socio-linguistic” and “socio-rhetorical.” For the audience that he is writing, this is an important distinction to establish. 

In the third section, Swales clearly outlines the characteristics of a discourse in a number-point fashion. This is rhetorically advantageous because it offers a clear visual structure that is easy and accessible for the reader to follow. In each numbered point, Swales states a brief statement about the characteristic, and immediately follows up with a brief, coherent explanation. After clearly describing the characteristics, he cements his argument about his definition of a discourse by giving an example of a discourse community. This is obviously an effective approach, as it gives evidence for his thesis.