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Discourse community Swales (1990) found that a discourse community has 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 utterance of its aims has acquired some specific lexis (specialized terminology, acronyms) has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.  

We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work.

Recent books by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”), Susan Faludi (“The Terror Dream”) and Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes — instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the books that first established their reputations. And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.

would have allowed Romeo and Juliet to move around, liberated from locale and parental surveillance. They would have been less worried about their families when they were figuring out where to meet. At the same time, their parents would have felt reassured because they could call their children and ask where they were and what they were doing. But, would Romeo and Juliet have told the truth? A location-aware app would also have been useful for parents in tracking them. Or they might have prowled friends’ Facebook updates or photo albums for clues.

Romeo and Juliet could find each other now because mobility means accessibility and availability. They’d be on each other’s top-five speed dial. And they would probably have had a location-aware app that that showed exactly where each other were: no wandering the streets of Verona looking for each other.