Ashanty Barrios 10/8/13 English 106 A.

Halliday Reading Response to John Swales This reading was to provide the reader with some background information and clarification for the concept of discourse community. Swales explains the differences between the commonly confused term of speech community and list the six characteristics of what makes discourse community. He expresses his opinion that peoples definitions have not been clear and specific enough so he took matters into his own hands and wrote out his definitions for discourse community. Following that, he briefly mentions that along with discourse community comes genre and rhetorical situation, which in term varies depending on the situation. It was difficult to understand when he began talking about the social views and how there are lists of criteria that are taken into account for social discourse. It confused me as the reader because he explaining these things using terms and phrases that only he or another professional would understand. Students, like myself, were probably not the intended audience for this reading which made it slightly more challenging to read through. The introduction to Swales did give us a very nice and helpful precautionary note that it would be harder to understand what he is talking about due to the fact that we did not read the rest of his writings. From my understanding of the article, discourse community is a very controversial topic that must be discussed further.