Blog 5

During our class discussion on discourse communities we theorized that some seem stronger when they are smaller in numbers. After reviewing our findings I found that certain groups lack a lot of communication, which in turns takes away form the group being a discourse community. Communication is a vital aspect in a discourse community, according to Swales. Its how the individuals in the group share their ideas and beliefs, this way everybody learns from one another. We can test this theory by taking certain discourse communities, ranging in sizes and see how well they communicate and how it effects the group. If the communication is strong the discourse community will benefit in a positive way. Some other data we could collect to see if our data is true would be to go interview individuals from discourse communities. We could ask the individuals what they think makes their community the most discourse and what makes it the least discourse.