Zachary Hurd English 106 M.

Parsons October 23, 2013 Draft 2 High school athletics can be extremely beneficial to a teenagers personal character. Being a part of a diverse team and working with several teammates not only builds skills in teamwork and the physical aspects of that sport, but in intercommunication as well. I was very involved in my high school swim team for the four years that I attended. I first got involved in the sport of swimming when I was in third grade by swimming on a team with my older brother at the local YMCA. From that point, I swam on and off for a club team called Boilermaker Aquatics. With my experience in swimming competitions I planned on joining the Harrison swim team ever since I heard that my brother made the team his freshman year in high school. I believe that being a swimmer on the Harrison High School swim team placed me in a Discourse Community. According to John Swaless six definitions of a Discourse Community, the swim team must, 1. Have a broadly agreed set of common public goals, 2. Have mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, 3. Use its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, 4. Utilize and hence possess one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims, 5. Acquire some specific lexis, and 6. Have a threshold of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise (Swales 471). Generally, I would consider most athletic teams to fulfill these criteria, knowing that an effective team depends on good communication. As a team, we would work hard in practice twice a day in order to perform well in competitions. But every year there was one competition that our whole team was excited for and wanted to be a part of; this was the IHSAA State Championships, commonly referred to as state. It was rare for our team to send more than eight swimmers to compete at state and so there was also excitement over Sectional

Championships. In this competition all of the swimmers on our team were able to compete, creating more motivation to practice hard and perform well. These were common public goals that our team shared each year, fulfilling the first Swales definition of a Discourse Community. My swim team communicated through a few different intercommunication mechanisms. There was obviously communication through conversation as feedback was given between teammates and coaches constantly throughout each practice. Team meetings were also held before practice began and while swimmers were stretching. These meetings provided information for the upcoming meets, practices, and athlete responsibilities. Outside of practice, we would communicate through text messages and phone calls. In this way we were easily connected and available to communicate. With these intercommunication mechanisms, our team fulfilled the second Swales definition of a Discourse Community. Attending the team meetings and communicating with teammates and coaches also qualifies as participatory mechanisms that were used to obtain feedback and get information. With these mechanisms we modified our techniques to perform better in the pool. This also qualifies our team for the third Swales Discourse Community. Every day, our team would practice in the morning before school and right after school. Before each practice we were given a Practice Set which included all of the work-out sets we would have to do that day, typed up on a piece of paper. We would also read additional information about the workout sets from a dry-erase board at one end of the pool. These two genres of communication allowed us to efficiently use our time during practice. With these genres, our team fulfilled the fourth Swales definition of a Discourse Community. Im sure that if someone who had never taken a swim course or joined a swim team had picked up one of our Practice Sets, they would have trouble understanding what was typed on the page. Each method used to improve a specific swim technique has a name that only a swimmer would understand.

For example, someone who had no prior knowledge would not realize that Freestyle, Backstroke, Breaststroke, and Butterfly were the four strokes of a swimming competition. They wouldnt understand abbreviations written on the Practice Sets either, such as SKSPS. Our team pronounces this as skips but it stands for swim, pull, swim, kick, and swim and outlines a specific warm-up swim set. With our own lexis, our team also fulfills the fifth Swales definition of a Discourse Community. Like most athletic teams, our swim team had tryouts. This means that our team had a threshold level of members that could join and could otherwise be called gated. In order to make the team, a swimmer would need a certain amount of experience and capability to get through tryouts. After tryouts swimmers would then be grouped into the Varsity and Junior Varsity (JV) teams. Even though swimmers depended on divers scores to win competitions, it was as though the divers were gated from the swimmers Discourse because they practiced differently and performed a different way. With the threshold level of members and gated diving and relay teams, our team fulfills the sixth and final Swales definition of a Discourse Community. I will be taking interviews of three teammates that I swam with over the past four years. With a personal interview, I can modify my questions easily to my interviewee and record data other than what they say such as how they respond, their attitude, etc.

Works Cited Demerly, Miles. Personal Interview. October 24, 2013. El-Khalili, Amir. Personal Interview. October 24, 2013. Oneal, Joseph. Personal Interview. October 24, 2013. Swales, John. The Concept of Discourse Community. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990. 21-32. Print.