Audience: Potential new members of your professional or academic field (e.g., recently admitted college freshman or entry-level employees)
Genre: Professional report
Purpose: Using the characteristics of a Discourse Community identified by John Swales, explain to your readers how your chosen academic major or professional career constitutes a D.C. Your ultimate goal is to help prepare them to succeed as a member of that community; you can think of this report as a sort of training manual or handbook.
Include the following information in your report:
- How does one become a member of this D.C.? What values and/or skills are helpful to succeed in this field?
- What are the public goals of the D.C.?
- What are its most important participatory mechanisms?
- How are those mechanisms used? (What kinds of information and feedback are offered)?
- What role does writing play within this D.C.? In particular, what are the most common genres it utilizes? What purposes do these genres serve within the larger context of the D.C.?
- You may also want to include representative examples of discourse-specific lexis.