John Swales lays down the concepts and basic principles of discourse communities which on a broad scale are that the communities have some sort of jargon or slang that is identifiable to a group for example a group of gamers might use a term like MMO or RPG which, unless you’re a gamer you will most likely not understand. As well as having terms related to the group it contains a public goal, such as BPA (business professionals of America) which like the name implies is to prepare participants to engage in the business world. Next, and what I view as the most important part of a discourse community, is communication, potential groups must be able to communicate with potential members to be a group like meetings every Wednesday or a newsletter present in the group which, in turn will also help with another principle of discourse community, a way to provide information and feedback, exemplified by if a basketball player is guarding the wrong person the coach or other teammates will use verbal communication to call the player an idiot and guard the right person. A form of hierarchy is also present inside a discourse community, there must be a set of leaders and novices. Lastly a discourse community must develop a genre to represent it such as gamers being known to play video games, jocks being known to play sports, etc.
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