My Future Discourse Community

"1. There must be some common, public “goal” the group seeks to accomplish, some work the participants are trying to perform together."

Association of medical illustrators (AMI) has a common goal to promote research and encourage the development of medical illustration and related education. The aim is to promote understanding and cooperation in the medical sector, including public health, nursing, and dentistry, and to develop medical illustrations. To this end, an annual conference will be held and a membership mentoring program will be held to train professionals. In order to certify the expertise, a certified exam is given and the test pass is given a certified medical illustrator (CMI).

"2. There must be some discursive “forum” accessible to all participants; oral, visual, and or/print media may be involved."

All members can attend the annual meeting held by the AMI and provide business-related resources on the website. Members can benefit from a variety of membership categories. Example: Profiled to AMI Members HUB, Community accessible within HUB, News regularly. Artworks can be entered at annual meeting exhibitions, and Salary & Pricing survey data can be accessed.

"3. The group must use its forum to work toward its goal by “providing information and feedback.”"

AMI members can provide information and get feedback through community forums and bulletin boards.

"4. The group develops expectations for how productive exchanges of information should proceed, which is to say that the group shares discourse conventions or “genres.”"

The group posted people's interviews so that new or existing members could see the benefits of exchanging information.

"5. The group’s discourse not only is thus specialized, but exhibits a tendency to become increasingly specialized; there is “an inbuilt dynamic towards an increasingly shared and specialized terminology.”"

Within this group are specialized terms related to “medical art”. This group provides legal, business, and technical terms and information related to medical illustrations.

"6. There must be a “critical mass” of experts in the group at any given time: people who are intimately familiar with the specialized genres with which the group seeks to accomplish its goals and who thus can initiate novices. The “survival of the community depends on a reasonable ratio between experts and novices” (2-3; I have quoted key terms and phrases)."

There are board members who are the core members, and their categories are divided into Professional, Associate, and Student. Professional members are an expert people of this group.

Works Cited

“What Is a Discourse Community?” Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness, by Patricia Bizzell, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh; London, 1992, pp. 222–237. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zwb7k.14.