- John Swales is currently a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan (meaning he’s technically retired but still has access to the resources of the university and is able to teach classes if/when he chooses). He is a linguist by profession with a bachelors in psychology from Cambridge. He has authored or co-written twenty books and around 130 research papers or book chapters. He is best know for his work on genre analysis.
- I think his perfect audience would be colleagues in the field of linguistics who would agree with his insights on the topic of discourse communities and wish to build upon his concepts. I have doubts that he envisioned his perfect audience as people who need much convincing. He seems more to have a tone of belittling those of differing views than trying to persuade them to his perspective.
- I believe this article is trying to settle the issue of a precise and concise definition for discourse communities. Swales seems to think there is too much confusion still over what a discourse community actually is and tries to lay a good foundation of definitions for the concept.
- While his readers may have been somewhat familiar with the concept of discourse communities or even believe that they were experts on the matter, Swales still saw a gap in the definition. It was too loose and easily confused with other concepts to be so easily identifiable and used as a label for something. Even after creating precise characteristics for a discourse community he points to some flaws that still need to be addressed so as to make a more ideal definition.
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Jake's Expanse 