As John Swales describes it a discourse community is a community that has six defining characteristics. These are: “a broadly agreed set of common public goals, has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, has acquired some specific lexis, and has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.” And each community will have its own unique set of these characteristics. I want to explore a community of nurses in a specific family practice doctor’s office.
I’m sure that, like in every doctor’s office, the group of nurses in each all have the same agreed upon common goals. The first common goal for the nurses in the doctor’s office I observed in was putting patient care first and foremost. This is their job, and also their passion. They want to provide the best care possible for their patients. Another goal is that the nurses try to do this as quickly as they can while being efficient. This is how they keep things running so smoothly on a daily basis.
The mechanism for intercommunication used most in the doctor’s office among nurses was the computer. I would have never thought this would be the case. Considering the technological advances of today I should have known this would be the mechanism of choice being that the office I chose to observe in is a larger one. Another form of intercommunication obviously would be talking to each other. Sometimes communicating through words rather than the computer makes the message being sent easier to understand. The nurses in this office also have meetings. Their meetings consist of all of them getting together and voicing their opinions on topics such as what they think some issues may be among the nurses in the office or how can they improve communication or the service to their patients.
In the office I observed in the participatory methods I talked about in the last paragraph all provide feedback. The computers provide feedback to everyone including doctor’s nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners and all of the other faculty on patient appointments, what their illness or health problems are, and how they want to treat them.
In the nursing community, I think what would be considered genres are the different levels of degrees. I observed ADN’s, BSN’s, and MSN’s. These differ in the amount of schooling each has. ADN’s have 2 year associate degrees, this is the lowest level of schooling you have to receive to become a registered nurse. You would get this degree from a community college or vocational school. A BSN would be the bachelor’s degree of Science in nursing. This is a four year degree that you would obtain from a university. And then there’s the Master’s of Science in nursing. You would earn this degree at a university after receiving a bachelor’s degree first. And it requires two additional years of college after the initial four. I think the biggest difference I saw in between each of these is the amount of authority each had.
Every discourse community has its own lexis, or in other words its own special way of communicating. The first lexis of course would be the terminology used by nurses. If you were listening to a pair of nurse’s talk about a patient’s condition, you would probably hear some words that you didn’t know the meaning of. Just for example, if you had no previous knowledge of any part of the medical field you wouldn’t know the myocardial infarction is a fancy word for a heart attack. You also wouldn’t know what it entailed if someone said that a baby was born with a malfunction in their aortic arch. There is also medical terminology, which are acronyms used not only by nurses but by the whole medical field. An example of one of these would be B.I.D. which stands for twice a day or H.S. means before bedtime. These acronyms make it quicker and easier for orders to be written down.
And lastly the discourse community has different levels of members. There are nurses coming and going all the time due to different reasons, rather it be that they don’t like the office or because they are moving or for any other reason. You have your newer nurses coming in who are learning the ropes of how things are done in that particular office. And then you have your nurses who have been there for a while and know all of the ropes on how things are done around their office. They know what works and what doesn’t.
Every discourse community is unique in its own way. They all have the same general characteristics, but they are very different when you look at the specific characteristics of a discourse community. The nursing discourse community is an interesting one to observe and I can’t wait to be a part of one.
kristenworthington 
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