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Running Head: DXC TECHNOLOGY DISCOURSE COMMUNITY

DXC TECHNOLOGY DISCOURSE COMMUNITY

Jose Luis Marquez

University of Texas at El Paso

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DXC TECHNOLOGY DISCOURSE COMMUNITY

INTRODUCTION

Discourse communities are people who have the same understanding and basics as their peers,

they use these understandings to achieve their common goals. In my example I will be using DXC

Technology as an example of a discourse community, DXC Technology works towards consulting

and proving information in technology to businesses and governments. In this discourse

community I interviewed Ilse Ortiz, a software developer who works in this company to provide

great IT service to MMIS (Medicaid Management Information System), in my interview I had her

explain to me the different ways that Swales discourse community implements into her workforce

and explained to her the six different characteristics of Swales.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Porter J. defines discourse communities as a group of individuals bound by a common interest

who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated (1986, Pg. 400),

Swales and porter say that discourse communities are the way of language people use in their work

place between their peers and that these discourse communities have various genres that only the

people that are familiar in this workplace understand the genres or their language, A discourse

community is a group of people who speak the same language, or in other words people who

share an interest in certain topics, share a body of knowledge about those topics, and possess a

common vocabulary for discussing those topics (The student guide, 2015, p. 206). Understanding

discourse communities and the fundamental meaning of the theory helps us understand the

language of various work corporations or discourse communities and get to understand what is the

purpose of their language/genres is, understanding discourse communities help us make it easier
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DXC TECHNOLOGY DISCOURSE COMMUNITY

to integrate ourselves into a discourse community or work force by understanding that each

different one of them have their own language and their own set of goals. Porter also expresses the

idea of intertextuality This is the principle we know as intertextuality, the principle that all writing

and speech indeed, all signs arise from a single network (pg. 396) I believe that by this porter

says that each idea that we have connects the dots back to someone elses thought and no ones

idea is pure in their own, all of the various discourse communities fall into this because all of them

needed to have started from someones elses idea and networked from there creating their own

set of people that have similar goals.

PRIMARY RESEARCH

As my primary research I chose to interview Ilse Ortiz who is a software developer at DXC

Technologies who specializes in delivering IT support to MMIS (Medicaid Management

Information System) and Medicare, she specializes in creating greater values for the clients,

partners, and shareholders. I interviewed and observed Ilse at her work place here in El Paso and

I was really impressed by the amount of discourse community communications system they use

and all the different kind of text/language the developers use at this company. The developers at

the company mainly focus on Work Skype between the people at the company, the workers used

the chat or the video chat, when they have conferences they use the meeting calls or to reach all of

the employees they sent out an email to all of them through Outlook. When talking to a person

above them for example their boss they choose to send an email because it is more formal then

starting a chat in skype. Most of the projects the developers are in are with teammates from all

over the country, therefore when they need to communicate with each other the only option for

them are to use Skype or to send emails through Outlook.

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DISCUSSION

Swales tests fit the pieces perfectly into DXCs company and showed me that discourse

communities are everywhere in the work force and in what you study. First in the test is the

common goal, the goal for all the employers at DXC is to develop software in technology for the

companies they are hired to support. The workers use various of ways to communicate through the

day and the most frequent one is through Outlook, they use email to communicate to their superiors

or also use skype to make conference calls with the people in their projects. All of their

communication system revolves around their computers since most of their team members are

spread out around the country and the easiest way to communicate and to ask advise is through

their work network, making these tools their most powerful participatory mechanisms. One genre

of DXC is to develop software, for example in DXC they develop software to support the

applications for Medicaid and Medicare. The language of software engineers goes very in depth

and it depends very much in which company you work for to really understand the language

fluently, some of the few words they utilize are code variables, tables, aidcategory, and diagnosis.

Code variables are used to manage data in a flow of a C program that could be integer character,

numeric, or alpha numeric, in this case C programs are source codes for MMIS. Tables are a set

of data that are structured in columns and are used in relational data bases, tables are used to store

all of their data. Aidcategory is a way to separate the recipients(clients) which are the people in

care at the hospitals, these people have benefits and the benefits are separated by group codes, the

software engineers separate them and see which recipients are qualified for certain benefits, the

last word of the language they use is diagnosis which is a group of codes for the recipients

diagnosis in that way in the MMIS the different kind of diseases apply the correct rate of service.

Furthermore, there are four different level of developers, the lowest is developer one which is the
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entry level, their job is to develop software under the surveillance of another developer higher than

them also known as the subject matter expert(SME), second is software developer two which job

is to develop software under their own analysis and designs, third is the software developer three

which is a technical leader or an SME, the last is a software developer four which can become an

application architect, application architects dont develop software they design the infrastructure

of the application. Through Swales test applied into the DXC corporation I noticed that all of the

engineers here never had their own ideas and it was impossible to because all of their work comes

back from one idea of one person and that person networked his ideas to every software engineer

and created the community at DXC.

CONCLUSION

Before stepping into the company of DXC Technology I had realized that this corporation fit into

the description of a discourse community through asking Ilse questions in the interview, while I

explained to her what genres was in discourse community and the meaning of language she gave

me some words that she frequently uses with her co-workers and I had no idea what they meant

until she explained all of them in very big detail, when I walked into the company I could see

cubicle after cubicle of workers in their laptops and most of them were either on a skype call or

conference call communicating with their peers to achieve their task at hand. Because of this I

realized that her corporation was a discourse community and fit perfectly into the six Swales

characteristics.
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REFERENCES

Porter, J. E. (1992). Audience and rhetoric: an archaeological composition of the discourse

community. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice H

Swales, John M. The Concept of Discourse Community. Genre Analysis: English in Academic
and Research Settings. Cambridge [England: Cambridge UP 1990] print