delving into the complicated task of defining genre knowledge and its development, I need to address what underlies the theory and practice of specialized writing. I see four constructs as fundamental: practice, task, discourse, and genre. In my view, these are somewhat parallel concepts, with practice and discourse describing broad levels of interaction and communication channels, while task and genre describe more specific, typified instances of the larger categories.
Taking a social view of written communication, practice may be defined as doing, where the meaning and the structure of that doing is constructed by its social and historical context (Wenger, 1998). Examples of practice include conducting research, reading, and writing. Through practice, writers interact with the artifacts and people within the given sociohistorical contexts, making meaning and building knowledge (Prior, 1998). A related concept is that of activity, such as participation in monthly laboratory meetings, collaboration on a journal article, or presentation of a conference paper. These events are defined by their sociohistorical context, their goals, and the “tools” and “objects” (e.g., genres or technology) used to carry out those goals. The term activity is associated with Vygotskyan sociocultural perspectives on learning, in which “object-directed, tool-mediated” interactions are referred to as activity systems (Russell, 1997). Activity has served as a powerful theoretical construct for many ethnographic studies of writers and writing contexts. However, I will limit its use throughout this book—at least in its more theoretical sense as part of activity theory—for several reasons. First, the research I share in this book is not fully ethnographic, in that I did not observe extensive social interactions in most of the writers’ contexts (with the exception of the writing classroom); it is in this careful ethnographic account of social practice that I believe activity becomes such a useful concept. Additionally, while activity theory has had much to contribute to studies of genre practice, I found myself often becoming lost in its terminological web when bringing it to the overlapping domains and communities that I follow in this book. As a result, I have turned instead to the concept of task.
As an alternative to activity, task may offer a more robust construct for studying the actual practice of individuals. Swales (1990) defines task as:
One of a set of differentiated, sequenceable goal-directed activities drawing upon a range of cognitive and communicative procedures relatable to the acquisition of pre-genre and genre skills appropriate to a foreseen or emerging sociorhetorical situation. (p. 74)
Though he describes task in the context of teaching methodology, I will use the term to refer to specific goal-oriented, rhetorical literacy events in both disciplinary and classroom domains—for example, writing a master’s thesis, collaborating on a conference paper, or completing a classroom assignment. Bracewell and Witte (2003) similarly propose task as an important construct for studying workplace literacy, defining it as “the set of goals and actions that implement these goals, which are developed in order to achieve a solution to a complex problem within a specific work context” (p. 528). While this definition shares similarities with that of activity, it is more localized in time and space and may therefore foreground individualized actions; writers engage in activities through tasks. Because the writers in my study often worked independently and because my research tended to focus more on these writers’ individual actions than on group participation, task in many cases provided a more useful metaphor for understanding their writing practice at given points in time. At the same time, I acknowledge that a focus on activity has much to offer the study of writing development; indeed, I see these theoretical approaches as complementary.
Key channels of participation in academic literacy practices and tasks include discourse and genre. In contrast to practice/task, which focus on social interaction, I use these terms to emphasize a focus on the language—oral, written, and even visual—used to mediate social interactions. On one level, discourse is the language, broadly speaking, used by particular groups and/or in particular situations. Corpus-based language analysis, for example, has illustrated that academic discourse can be characterized by certain linguistic features that distinguish it from other registers, such as conversation, news, or fiction (Biber, 1988). More recent work has studied discourse variation among academic disciplines, finding linguistic differences between disciplines like history and biology (Conrad, 2001) or, more broadly, the soft sciences and the hard sciences (Hyland, 2000). While this primarily linguistic use of the term is focused on structural patterns, discourse also encompasses the ideologies and worldviews that shape and are shaped by communication. The term disciplinary discourse, for instance, captures the meaning of “thinking and talking like an engineer” (or biologist, or philosopher, and so on). Discourse is, as Gee (1999) describes it, more than language; it is an “identity kit.” Discourses shape our perceptions of the world, including how we communicate, act, interact, and understand.
When discourses become typified—that is, when the same events are carried out repeatedly through the same practices—they may be referred to as genres. Examples of written genres include dissertations, research articles, manuscript reviews, or submission letters, and each of these may be carried out uniquely by different social groups. Dissertations, for example, differ in a range of ways across institutions, disciplines, and geopolitical contexts. Becoming an accepted member of a disciplinary community (in both its local and global manifestations) is at least partially dependent on mastery of its discourse and unique use of genres, or the preferred means for arguing and evaluating within the field (McNabb, 2001; Said, 1982). Genre theory offers one means for understanding this type of conventionalized disciplinary communication.
Since the mid-1980s, many in applied linguistics, rhetoric, and education have turned to a view of genre as social action (Bazerman, 1988; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Kamberelis, 1995; Miller, 1984; Swales, 1990). Miller (1984) argues that a rhetorical view of genre must center on the action that a genre carries out, rather than on its formal features or “text type”; it is through this social action that people create the knowledge that is necessary in reproducing the generic structure (Miller, 1994). Genre is therefore a product or byproduct of repeated, specialized practice. At the same time, genres themselves may shape activities over time, providing a structure or scaffolding for practice (Bazerman, 1988; Kamberelis, 1995). More recently, Devitt (2004) has described genre as not so much a response to a recurring situation, but rather a “nexus between an individual’s action and socially defined context” (p. 31). This metaphor accounts for the structurated nature of genres as they act and are acted upon by individuals and in social contexts. In this thoroughly rhetorical view, learning to use genres requires much more than learning text types and forms; it requires learning the social contexts, actions, and goals that give genres their meaning.
To this point, a sizable body of research has analyzed genres with the aim of uncovering the rhetorical functions that give rise to certain discoursal features. Ken Hyland’s (2000) work, for example, has convincingly shown how features like generic move structure, citations, and hedges and boosters reflect the ideologies and epistemologies of their authoring communities. Genres that carry heavy weight in the academic world have been studied in the most depth, giving rise to rather detailed descriptions of research articles across disciplinary, cultural, and linguistic communities. In the early days, such work appeared to be motivated by an interest in uncovering “teachable” textual features to second language writers. More recently, this research seems to be more concerned with complicating our understanding of text types and their dynamic and social nature. In both cases, it is clear that genres act not only as channels of communication but also as barriers for novices or outsiders. Genres have a way of regulating communication among groups, and as their features become conventionalized, the values embedded in them too become assumed and often unquestioned. Given the hierarchical nature of many disciplinary communities, genres may therefore benefit the expert, who can use the genres in rhetorically effective ways, and further exclude or alienate the novice, for whom the values and conventions are more mysterious or perhaps even distasteful. This dynamic is clearly evident in academic discourse, as students struggle to play the game of academic writing, but it also exists in professional and public spheres.
Networks of Genres
While
