speech and discourse communities

i often find Swales tough to grapple with. like most scholarly pieces, his has an agenda, and i feel it's important for me to keep track both of his argument, and the reason he's making it. there's this term, he seems to be saying, discourse community, and some people are suggesting that it's the same as a speech community and we don't need a separate definition for it. but he thinks we do, and he finds squishing the two concepts together like that confusing.

because, he says, it's not the same -for several reasons. for one thing, discourse communities aren't bounded by speech. it's not that they don't use speech, or that speech is trivial; rather it's that people can be in the same discourse community even if they live far away and never meet one another. if you think of nursing as a discourse community, one could suggest then that an american nurse and an italian nurse, in spite of distance, language barriers, somewhat different cultures, etc, would still "recognize" each other, share similar goals, etc.

a second difference, he says, is that speech communities are socialinguistic, not sociorhetorical. in the first, it's the socialization that is most important. when we spend time with friends and family, it's our sense of solidarity that is in the foreground. sociorhetorical groups tend to be united more by goals, which usually isn't the case for, say, a group of friends. so this is different too.

and then, he says speech groups include (i'm thinking here, maybe, of my arabic professor talking about the way a shared language might unite people with somewhat different cultures) while discourse communities tend to exclude. part of what makes them what they are is that their language and goals may not be fully grasped by outsiders.

teaching seems like a lame example here, but i'm going with it. a good friend of mine, who is a lawyer by trade, offered to cover a class for me. as i began talking about what he would need to do in the class session, i realized (and he realized) that the full implications of the assignments/activities weren't really available to him. i used terms he didn't know, or i used terms he thought he knew in ways that were new to him. (the same, i'm sure, would happen to me if he asked me to lawyer for him.) because i study rhetoric, and his profession closely touches rhetoric, we often think of ourselves as "in the same field," but this conversation showed that in fact there's a large gap between what i am and what he is. we have specialized knowledge and goals that make us Other. on the other hand, i am friends with a couple of older women who happen to be nuns. on the surface, it wouldn't seem like i (secular, flippant, fear of commitments) have much in common with these ladies. but many nuns are nurses or teachers, and these women happen to be teachers as well. and it turns out, no matter where you teach, a teacher is a teacher is a teacher. we understand certain things about one another's lives without needing explanation. we each belong to multiple discourse communities, but we have this one in common.