FLORINO, KENT IVAN P.

  Essay 1 

2019-20276 1200 Words 

Eng 13 THU1 

Cracking the Characters’ Characteristics 

Discourse plays a crucial role in keeping the knowledge and ideas flowing in abundance which 

in the same case, should be refined time-to-time. It is a general agreement to any formations 

and institutions that it needs to generate insights thus stirring discourse and producing relative 

knowledge, even if it will come to a point that a socially and politically incorrect ideas should be 

smashed in line with the groups set of ‘morality’ or ideologies. This brings the vitality of the first 

defining characteristic of a discourse community: it should have a h

​ as a broadly agreed set of 

common public goals. 

The common public goal will be the markers to every member of a discourse community while 

their executing their work aligned with their desired ending. It is very easy to grasp that this will 

encapsulate the essence of every work that needs to be done in a discourse community. 

Without the common public goals, each member of a discourse community will be lost; they 

might find themselves doing what other discourse communities are supposedly doing. This will 

surely inflict fatal damages to the membership and most importantly, the efficiency of work will 

not be maximized due to the reason that their purposes as a discourse community are not 

uphold. 

Say, that an organization already has its clear set of common public goals and clear vision of 

the discourse community’s matrix of its finishing point, it also requires mechanisms of 

intercommunication among its members. By the word discourse itself, it is easy to explain that 
it requires communication to every member for it is also natural for a human-led and built 

institution to have their means to talk (speech) or write to each other to facilitate their group 

towards its goals and aspirations. 

A form of an intercommunication is the discourse community’s third defining characteristic: it 

should ​use its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.​ In the 

Marxist-Leninist-Maoist school of thinking, there is such called ‘criticism and self-criticism’ in 

which a group, that can be considered as discourse community, will be given a chance in a 

meeting to throw questions, suggestions, interrogate each other in the mission of bettering the 

totality of a discourse community​[1].  

On a more personal touch, I myself is involved in a participatory mechanisms providing 

information and feedback. Being a writer in Philippine Collegian, it is required for us to attend 

two meetings per week (taking aside the special meetings made for occasions e.g. content 

pitching for First Quarter Storm, etc). The two meetings, in our publication language is being 

called ‘genmit’ and ‘sekmit’ or in a more stricter English terms, is commonly known as general 

meeting and section meeting. This a group discussion allowing the members and applicants in 

the institution to exercise their rights to inquiry and suggestion and enable themselves to 

contribute in polishing plans to make a more stellar and feasible ideas. 

Tackling about Philippine Collegian, the publication had become the forefront of journalistic 

activism and undaunted reportage of the timely issues amid the worsening political turmoil in 

the Philippines from the Marcos era of dictatorship up until today. The institution ​utilizes and 

hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims (the fourth 

defining characteristic of a discourse community) which in the very basic sense, as a publication, it 

uses newspaper as a means to disseminate the aims of the publication that can be considered as a 
discourse community. Furthermore, there are also various social media platforms which are 

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram made for a wider reach of audience to forward. Website is also 

existent providing an expanded avenue to collate everything about the discourse community.  

To better communicate and understand the people inside and outside the discourse community, it is 

not enough to just have the genres for communicative furtherance. It is also a prerequisite for a 

discourse community to establish their own set of lexicons. Lexis or Lexicons are own set of words 

for a particular branch of knowledge. These lexicons can scope a wide range of words obtained 

through but not exclusive to the mechanisms such as innovation or creation of separate root words 

for an existing word​[2] ,​ loan words, compounding, abbreviations acronyms, among others. The 

process of building such lexis are called lexicalization​[3] w

​ hich plays a very important role to have 

a more deeper and engaging intercommunication not just inside the discourse community a 

specific person is currently belonging with but also the other discourse communities existing. 

In Philippine Collegian, as stated above, we have genmit and sekmit or general meeting and 

section meeting. We also have our ‘pakulo’ or a Filipino loan word which means a unique way of 

presenting different contents. There is what we call ‘IOTS’ or Isko on the Streets which is a lexi 

pertaining to a segment of our content in social media doing a Humans of New York style of 

interviewing; case study with picture when posted.  

But these all will not prosper into a perceived manifestation if there are no people deliberating of 

which tasks are they going to do. Thus, this last defining characteristic of a discourse 

community pertains to its membership, us, the people inside our respective discourse 

communities.  

In UP Diliman’s university-wide publication, the membership can be classified into three 

different groups: the probee (probationary), staff, and the Editorial Board. The probationary 
members are the students that recently taken the examination and interview and successfully 

passed those which makes them already part of Kule. In simpler terms to explain, they are 

novices. The staff, meanwhile, are the members part of the publication whose contributions are 

glaring in different issues of published newspapers and online content. They are considered 

protégé, honed to skills they must embody because they will be having the highest position in 

the publication as they go along they journey to journalistic reporting. Editorial Board consists of 

the people which has expertise in their different fields and they manage and facilitate internal 

and external relations of publication to ensure the continuous publication production. Without 

these three, there will be no future of the publication/discourse community. There are no 

novices to climb up to the responsibility when the staff and editorial board are on the verge of 

ending their tasks inside. There are not staff geared to be future editorial board which manages 

all the necessary matter the publication needs to face. If there would be no editorial board, the 

present will halt to exist. 

To wrap this all up, the membership could be parallel to the distinct characteristics. Without 

these above mentioned characteristics, the concept of being a discourse community will 

become too vague. Very unclear that it can be interchanged with a speech community and any 

other communities that in itself, also have different set of standards separating it from a 

discourse community.  

Knowing all of this must remind us that this must not remain a surface though, a theory, or an 

idea. This must come to praxis to make our different discourse community be better. 

Sharpening all of its distinct traits to the advantage of the members, might as well include those 

from outside, even the basic masses. 

Bibliography: 

1. Stalin, J. (1975). ​The Foundations of Leninism.​ The United States: Foreign Language 

Press. 

2. Metcalf, A. (2002). ​Predicting New Words - The Secrets of Their Success.​ Boston: 

Houghton Mifflin Compay. 

3. Geert, B. (2005). T
​ he grammar of words: an inroduction to linguistic morphology.​ Oxford: 

Oxford University Press.