Discourse Community

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People who work in the medical field are natural at helping and caring for others. They focus on preventing disease and illness, and have the knowledge to make a diagnosis for the patient and treat their illness. With that being said, this isn’t a one-man job. If you’ve ever spent time in a hospital — either as a patient, staff member, or visitor — then you know that the health care system is extremely complicated by nature. Good medical care depends upon effective communication between patients and providers. Ineffective communication can lead to an improper diagnosis or even improper medical treatment. For example, you have many different individuals that keep the hospital running. They all have unique set of skills and talent that are utilize…show more content…
We fail to realize that discourse communities surround us in many ways. My Allied Health class was a discourse community I was apart of. “A discourse community is a group of people who share certain language-using practices to complete a certain goal” (John Swales, 224). To be considered a discourse community, it must abide to six characteristics. They must have a broadly agreed set of common public goals, a mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, use participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, acquired some specific lexis, and have a threshold level of members with suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. (John Swales, 220-222). Now I can explain how being in Allied Health qualifies as a discourse community. First, having a set of common goals. Everyone that was placed in this class was because we had a passion for medicine. In our own way wanted to help others, whether if it was to become a nurse, surgeon, or pharmacist. We all have the mindset of helping others in…show more content…
Unlike a factory where work flows are standardized, each patient in a hospital is unique and requires special treatment, this is why communication is key within a hospital. To better understand how communication within this discourse community correlate I conducted an interview and a poll/survey. For my interview an expert in the medical community was chosen and questioned on how they use communication techniques on an everyday basic. To further identify communication a poll/survey was conducted that was directed towards former Allied Health

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