Blog » BP4: The Community of Meatheads
Posted on 24 Mar 2013 18:37
Introduction
A discourse community can best be exemplified through a workout gym—for my purposes, LA fitness. The gym is a community that shares a common goal, and I’d like to further study this community as a discourse community. I can do my research by reading their texts and talking to and interviewing trainers who are a part of this discourse community, and it will be easier because I am also a part of this discourse community.
Description
So far, I think a discourse community falls under six characteristics as defined by John Swales. I’ve read that discourse communities have these following characteristics: “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common goals, a discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, a discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, a discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, in addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis, a discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. I think by studying this discourse community, it’ll reveal why the discourse community was originally started, and the true purpose of the community.
My Plan
For this project, I am going to conduct my own research study of the gym as a discourse community. In order to do so, I’m going to analyze their blog, talk to current members, and interview them to get firsthand information on this discourse community. First, I’m going to try and gather as much information as I can from the blog, before I consult everyone. Then I’ll formulate a list of questions based on my findings from the blog analysis, and then I could talk about my own experience and how I got started in this discourse community. Lastly, I could also interview trainers and other employees who work in this discourse community.
Qualifications
I think I could pull this off because first and foremost, I’m highly interested in this discourse community. Moreover, I have the necessary resources such as documents and members to accumulate the necessary information I need. Also, since I have been a long time member and I have a great passion in this discourse community, I think that I am fairly well qualified for the job.
Challenges
However, there will be some slight obstacles that might make this project and research a little hard. Finding time to interview the members of the community will be difficult because we have completely different schedules, and they might have a lot of training appointments already scheduled. However I think this will be beneficial because I’ll learn a lot about the discourse community that I’m studying which will be useful to me because in the future, I want to continue to be a part of this community. I’ll learn a lot about he community and go really in depth on the methodology and purpose of this specific community.
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