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Series Editor’s Preface
Charles Bazerman
The longer you work with genre, the more it reveals and the more it connects with—perhaps because genre is at a central nexus of human-sense-making, where typification meets utterance in pursuit of human action. To communicate effectively we need to know what kind of situation we are in, what kinds of things are being said, and what kinds of things we want to accomplish. The evolving variety of human circumstances, the creative potentials of language, and the cleverness of human action challenge us to know where we are and where we are going in interactions, especially since we must be intelligible to other people equally struggling to make sense of communicative situations from their separate perspectives. Shared social attributions of genre help us and those we communicate with to be on the same page, or close enough for our practical purposes.
Many aspects of communication, social arrangements, and human meaning-making are packaged in genre recognition. Genres are associated with sequences of thought, styles of self-presentation, author-audiences stances and relations, specific contents and organizations, epistemologies and ontologies, emotions and pleasures, speech acts and social accomplishments. Social roles, classes, institutional power are bound together with rights and responsibilities for producing, receiving, and being ruled by genres. Genres shape regularized communicative practices that bind together organizations, institutions, and activity systems. Genres by identifying contexts and plans for action also focus our cognitive attention and draw together the dynamics of our mind in pursuit of specific communicative relations, thereby exercising and developing particular ways of thinking. I would not be surprised if brain researchers were to find that typification and genre leave their mark on brain organization as the child matures into an articulate and literate adult.
By following genres we can see both the complex regularities of communicative life and the individuality of each situated utterance. Awareness of robust types and purposeful individual variation responsive to local circumstances provides an antidote to over-simplifying models of writing instruction. Genre helps us see the purposefulness and flexibility of form, rather than form being just a matter of correctness and fulfillment of a few school-based tasks, created purely for instruction and assessment. A proper understanding of genre also reveals the underlying communicative action and social situation which give reason to the form and motive to acts of reading and writing. An understanding of genre brings us into touch with the manifold uses of writing in different parts of society, the economy, governance and culture. Awareness of genre and skill in adapting to the varieties of action possible, using a wide range of linguistic tools, prepares us and our students for wide ranging participation and purposeful innovation.
Given the richness of the concept of genre, it is no wonder that many approaches to understanding and teaching genre have developed, in many regions of the world. This volume provides an informed and thoughtful introduction to all of these approaches and provides means for understanding their relation as well as pursuing deeper study of each. I am deeply appreciative for the work of the authors and am confident you will find their work useful as you explore the meaning of genre for yourselves as writers, as teachers of writing, and as students of the wonder of human communicative accomplishment.
Acknowledgments
As we developed this book, we benefited greatly from the vibrant intellectual community of scholars in Rhetorical Genre Studies, many of whom are featured in this book. We especially thank Chuck Bazerman, the editor of this series and a renowned genre scholar, for his generous feedback and invaluable, expert advice. His careful reading and insightful responses have made this a much better book, helping us to tighten the manuscript and pushing us to consider and to integrate additional perspectives on genre, including international perspectives.
A special thanks to our friend, colleague, and mentor, Amy Devitt, whose seminar in genre theory at the University of Kansas in 1994 initiated and inspired our interest in genre and whose rich body of scholarship on genre and collaborative endeavors with us (conference presentations, articles, and a textbook on genre) have informed and enriched our understanding of genre.
In addition, we have had the good fortune of working with truly exceptional graduate students who have contributed to and deepened our investigations and understanding of genre over the years, with a special thanks to the students in the Spring 2008 genre theory seminar (English 564) at the University of Washington. We are also indebted to our research teams at the University of Tennessee and the University of Washington, without whose collaboration we could not have carried out a large, cross-institutional empirical study of genre learning: Bill Doyle, Cathryn Cabral, Sergio Casillas, Rachel Goldberg, Jennifer Halpin, Megan Kelly, Melanie Kill, Shannon Mondor, and Angela Rounsaville.
We would also like to thank Rebecca Longster for her skilled copy-editing and careful and thorough reading of our manuscript and David Blakesley for his guidance through this project and for his superb editing and production of the book. A special thanks also to Melanie Kill, who generously contributed a comprehensive glossary and annotated bibliography.
Additionally, we are grateful for the institutional support we have received from our department heads, Chuck Maland and Gary Handwerk, as well as our colleagues at the University of Tennessee and University of Washington. Our project was funded in part by the Office of Research Exhibit, Performance, and Publication Expenses (EPPE) Fund, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the John C. Hodges Better English Fund at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, for which we are thankful.
We are especially grateful to our families for their patience and encouragement as we completed this project. For Mary Jo, a special thanks to Dan; and for Anis, a special thanks to Amy, and to Daliah and Aden.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we thank each other. We completed this project while both of us were serving as Writing Program Administrators and directing large programs. But despite the challenges of finding the time and energy to pursue this project, the collaborative process kept us going, creating a shared commitment and intellectual energy that would have been much more difficult to muster on our own. This shared intellectual vision—along with a lot of laughter and good humor—inspired and motivated us to persevere.
1 Introduction and Overview
Over the past thirty years, researchers working across a range of disciplines and contexts have revolutionized the way we think of genre, challenging the idea that genres are simple categorizations of text types and offering instead an understanding of genre that connects kinds of texts to kinds of social actions. As a result, genres have become increasingly defined as ways of recognizing, responding to, acting meaningfully and consequentially within, and helping to reproduce recurrent situations. This idea of genres as typified rhetorical ways of interacting within recurring situations (Miller, “Genre as Social Action”) has had a profound impact on the study and teaching of writing. Researchers and teachers working across borders (North America, Australia, Brazil, France and Switzerland), across disciplines (applied linguistics, TESOL, rhetoric, composition studies, technical communication, critical discourse analysis, sociology, education, literary theory), and across grade levels and contexts (primary, secondary, post-secondary as well as professional and public writing) have explored the analytical and pedagogical implications of genre in ways that reveal genres as significant variables in literacy acquisition. In order to consider what a genre approach to the study and teaching of writing means and how it can best be implemented, this book examines the various traditions that have shaped our understanding of genre, and how these traditions have informed work in genre research and pedagogy.
Despite the wealth of genre scholarship over the last thirty years, the term genre itself remains fraught with confusion,
