I feel like everyone belongs to many discourse communities, whether they’re extremely specific or very broad. A discourse community I belong to that I’m going to evaluate for the six characteristics Swales uses to define a discourse community is co-parenting/parenting in general.

Everyone in my daughters life has the common goal of raising Ivy to be healthy, happy, and loved. We all want Ivy to be the best version of herself, to always be supported and know that she is surrounded by people who love her. While all the love and kindness are necessary in her upbringing, we all know that she needs discipline and guidance from what’s right and what is wrong as well. How myself, Ivy’s dad, his family and my family discipline her is as very consistent.

As far as intercommunication, it’s very basic: I talk to her dad every day about what she’s doing, what we need to do, etc. Phone calls, face time, seeing him in person, etc. Swales #3 characteristic is “…uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback”. I feel like #2 and #3 merge together with the co-parenting/parenting community.

Raising a child consists of many different “genres”. From health care, to education, to birthday celebrations, to just the general day-to-day agendas.

Raising Ivy has prompted her paternal side and maternal side of the family to create our own lexis. We spell a lot of words now when she’s around, like if it’s 9:30pm and we are talking about taking her somewhere the next day we don’t want her to hear it and get all worked up when its bed times. Or even if I want a C-O-O-K-I-E, I know if I say that out loud it really means Ivy is getting a cookie. Ivy also has her own words that mean different things. For example, we all know when she says, “e hop” she means thank you. or when she says no in a certain tone, it can mean several different things.

Lastly, there is definitely a threshold level of “members” in Ivy’s life. It’s very obvious that Wyatt, her dad, and I are #1. We make decisions together for her and we don’t do anything without consulting each other. Second to us, would probably be my parents, because Ivy is with them majority of the time to Wyatt and I. Third would be his parents, fourth Ivy’s aunts and uncle, and so on.

A time that I resisted a discourse community would be when I worked for a private practice and they were doing things that went against my morals and values. Without going into too much detail, basically they were not following certain laws about providing interpreters for non-English-speaking patients and allowing family members to translate for them. Although this could be more comfortable for the patients, the practice wasn’t doing it for the comfort. They were doing it to say money by not having to pay for translators. Also, there are laws about family members translating medical information to patients in which the information may be altered if there is a conflict of interest, i.e. the person translating knowing the patient on a personal level.  When I brought this up in a staff meeting, I was basically told there would be an issue if they noticed I was scheduling translators when a family member was available to translate for the patient. So, I respectfully put my 2 weeks’ notice in and continued to schedule translators.