of epistemic reality, they provide a framework for understanding the writers’ knowledge at different points in time and the ways in which various practices influence knowledge development.
I use the term formal knowledge to refer to the more structural elements of genre—the genre’s prototypical form(s), discourse or lexico-grammatical conventions of the genre, the contents or structural moves that are common to the genre, and the various modes and media through which the genre may be communicated. This knowledge focuses on the textual instantiation of the genre, in either oral or written form. Knowledge of a genre’s contents or modality is used here to refer to a relatively “arhetorical” understanding based primarily on knowledge of conventionalized form rather than a focus on the rhetorical context. Formal knowledge also includes knowledge of linguistic code—an issue that is of special relevance to those writing in their second language or dialect.
Process knowledge refers to all of the procedural practices associated with the genre—that is, how a genre is carried out. Such knowledge would encompass the process(es) that users of the genre go through in order to complete their intended action, such as the oral interactions that might facilitate effective reception of a genre or the actual composing processes that aid the writer in text completion. Process knowledge also encompasses an understanding of the distribution of the genre to its audience and the reading practices of the receivers of the genre. Finally, process knowledge includes knowledge of the larger genre network and a grasp of how the networked genres work together in chains, sets, or systems.
Both formal knowledge and process knowledge have great potential to overlap with rhetorical knowledge, which captures an understanding of the genre’s intended purposes and an awareness of the dynamics of persuasion within a sociorhetorical context. Writers need, for example, a sense of what the genre is intended to do within a local context and how power is distributed within that context. They also need to anticipate the readers of the genre, in terms of their purposes for reading the text, their expectations for the text, and their values that may influence their reception of the text. Rhetorical knowledge further includes the writer’s understanding of his or her own positioning vis-à-vis the context and the specific readers. A writer’s age, professional status, and perceived linguistic abilities are just some factors that are likely to influence the writing and reception of any genre.
Finally, subject-matter knowledge is an important, yet often overlooked (Jolliffe, 1995), domain of genre knowledge. When writing a research article in biomedical engineering, for example, a writer’s knowledge of the relevant content within biomedical engineering is crucial for his or her success in writing the text. Other genres, such as résumés, require less subject-matter knowledge. However, when interacting with other knowledge domains, subject-matter knowledge is essential in pushing writers toward expertise for many genres.
While the construct of knowledge is certainly more abstract than much of my discussion here might imply, I nevertheless find categorization of knowledge domains to be useful in tracing writers’ knowledge development in different contexts. Are certain knowledge dimensions developed more efficiently in some contexts than in others? Do strategies for developing different knowledge domains differ? Following writers and attempting to peer inside their minds and texts, I have come to see knowledge as an awareness (conscious or unconscious) that can deepen and extend as it is applied in new situations and as writers pull together various knowledge features to greater or lesser degrees. As I traced the formal, rhetorical, process, and subject-matter dimensions of genre knowledge, I saw them become increasingly integrated with growing expertise—inseparably so.
Figure 1 provides a visual metaphor for this increased integration, where writers’ knowledge of unfamiliar genres may artificially separate the genre’s form, subject matter, rhetorical goals and context, and procedures that surround its distribution and reception.
Figure 1. Integration of genre knowledge.
When first approaching the task of writing a job application letter, for example, the writers I followed tended to think of form and content as distinct from issues of the rhetorical context or procedures. They asked themselves questions like what is the proper form? or what do readers expect to find in this letter? But they did not ask what I might call more “integrated” questions like how might I modify the organization of my letter for this particular employer?—at least not in their first encounters, which took place within a classroom environment.
In early genre encounters, writers are faced with the demands of attending to multiple generic issues, and the cognitive load becomes heavier as multiple layers of requisite knowledge are added to picture, such as linguistic elements or the composing process. Furthermore, general distinctions between first and second language writing would suggest that these demands are even more complex for second language writers. But as writers re-encounter the same genre, certain dimensions of genre knowledge eventually become more or less “second nature,” so that the writer no longer needs to attend explicitly to those features (Jolliffe & Brier, 1988; Kamberelis, 1995). This process reflects very closely that of cognitive theories of language learning relating to processing and automaticity (see, for example, Segalowitz, 2003). As McLaughlin (1990) describes it, when a complex task is first approached, people attend to various features of the task; with a great deal of practice, the component skills become automatic.
With practice, boundaries between the components, or dimensions (as in Figure 1), become fuzzier. Writers integrate some dimensions but still focus on other individual elements in isolation. The extent of overlap or discreteness among dimensions depends on the situational context and task to which the writers are responding. Additionally, writers may find themselves foregrounding or backgrounding different knowledge dimensions when responding to different tasks (Prior, 1998; Tardy, 2003). In a writing classroom, for example, writers may be more apt to focus predominantly on form; on the other hand, in a disciplinary exam such as a doctoral preliminary paper, they may focus on subject-matter content. This tendency may provide some insight into the issue of whether or not different dimensions are better developed in different domains (Freedman, 1993a, 1993b; Freedman, Adam, & Smart 1994). As I’ll illustrate in later chapters, the writers in my research were able to develop some rhetorical knowledge in the writing classroom, but their primary focus in that setting tended to be on form. In their disciplinary courses, on the other hand, the writers often attended more to subject-matter and rhetorical dimensions than to formal dimensions.
Genre knowledge development, like all writing development or language development, more broadly, does not occur in simple linear fashion. Rather, learners seem to go through a process of restructuring, so that new knowledge results in qualitative changes to the internal organization of knowledge, rather than simply in the addition of new structural knowledge. In McLaughlin’s (1990) words:
Restructuring can be seen as a process in which the components of a task are coordinated, integrated, or reorganized into new units, thereby allowing the procedure involving old components to be replaced by a more efficient procedure involving new components. (p. 118)
In other words, writers do not accumulate new knowledge as something like an expanding bulleted list; rather, every new “bit” of knowledge becomes integrated with existing knowledge, resulting in a fundamental change to the learners’ larger understanding.
As the writers described in this book became more expert genre users, they spoke of texts and textual practices in a way that considered form, rhetoric, procedure, and subject matter as inseparable. In doing so, their previous understanding of dimensions like form was revised. For instance, as one writer spoke of his attempts to organize a conference paper, he drew simultaneously on his understanding of process, form, rhetoric, and subject matter. In analyzing data from this writing task, I found these categories of knowledge to be of little use as they no longer captured the delicate shades of genre knowledge that the writer held at that point. While other genre knowledge theories (e.g., Berkenkotter
