intro/synthesis pro 3

Chloe Brotherton

Project #3 Intro/Synthesis

November 5, 2012

 

            According to Swales, a discourse community must contain the following six characteristics: a broad set of common public goals, mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, use its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback, possess one or more genres in the in the communicative furtherance of its aims, acquire some specific lexis, and have a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.   Discourse communities are all over the world and can be ranged from academic to non-academic.  A discourse community is more of a suggestive term and is not necessarily defined.  The discourse community I am choosing to study is my job Tropical Smoothie Café back in West Chester, Ohio (about 30 minutes north of Cincinnati).  I consider Tropical Smoothie Café a discourse community because our goal is to give great service to our customers, we communicate to achieve our goals and have meetings quite frequently, we are honest and critical of each other so the employees can be the best they can, we have multiple means of communication (email, text, face to face), we all strive to be the best business we can, and we have all been trained at the same level.

            A broad set of common public goals that Tropical Smoothie Café shares are providing extraordinary service/care to our customers, keeping the work place clean and organized, always keeping busy, as well as having fun.  We treat our customers with the upmost, sincere respect.  So many of our customers have become regulars and we know a majority of them on a first name basis.  We give out a lot of free smoothies and coupons, too.  When there is downtime, the Tropical Smoothie Café employees do easy tasks, like stocking cups or sweeping the floor.  These may not sound like that big of jobs, but they make all the difference.  Jeff, the owner of Tropical Smoothie, believes, “You can’t do your best at something if you hate it,” so he lets his employees have fun on the job.  I would consider this an effective work ethic; we are eager and energetic at the work place which reflects our attitudes towards the customers.  We play upbeat music around the clock and if no customers are around, we are allowed to converse with one another as well as make food or smoothies.  There is not a single employee that doesn’t enjoy working at Tropical Smoothie Café and with that in mind it’s easier to achieve our goals.