Swales’ article sucks because it does not use a lot of common language. It is really long and kind of boring and it is hard to follow. He speaks only to linguists as a discourse community. There’s good information, but it is hard to read.
The audience of Swales is fellow colleagues. He is a professor of linguistics. The gap is that his readers do not know what defines a discourse community, and how it is different than a speech community. This piece fills the gap, because it defines discourse communities and talks about how a speech community is different . The issue is that there is not a good definition of discourse communities. The danger is that people will not be able to understand.
Gabriella's Blog 