the instructor but an expert relative to someone else.)
Helping Students Think about Genre
In addition to purpose and audience, another important rhetorical concept is genre. The term genre refers to recurring types of writing identifiable by distinctive features of structure, style, document design, approach to subject matter, or other markers. Genres usually arise from recurring cultural occasions or rhetorical situations with their own recognizable patterns. Certain cultural contexts or situations might call a writer to, say, compose a syllabus, a tweet, a complaint letter, or a scholarly article (all examples of genres) or to purchase a birthday card or a bumper sticker (genres that let you convey a message without much effort of your own). Any given genre has prototypical members that exemplify the most common features of the genre as well as innovative members that push the limits of the genre, playing creatively with its features. Some genres, such as the APA research report, are governed by strictly prescribed rules (the Publication Manual of the APA) set forth by the discourse community. Other genres are more diffuse or open to a wide range of structures and style (popular magazine articles, blogs, the personal essay). Exhibit 3.1 shows some typical examples of genres.
EXHIBIT 3.1 Examples of Genres
| Personal Writing | Academic Writing | Popular Culture | Public Affairs/Civic Writing | Professional/ Workplace Writing |
| Letter Diary/journal Reflection Autobiographical essay (literary nonfiction) Blog Text message Personal essay Facebook page | Scholarly article Book/chapter Abstract Conference paper | Magazine article Advertisement Hip‐hop lyrics Bumper sticker Graffiti Fan website Comic book Newspaper article Greeting card | Letter to the editor Op‐ed piece Tweet Advocacy website White paper Political blog Advocacy poster Magazine article on civic issue Policy brief Documentary film | Cover letter Résumé Business memo Legal brief Brochure Technical manual Proposal Marketing plan Management report |
The concept of genre is often confusing to students. One way John tries to explain genre is to create an analogy between genres and dress codes. Just as some social occasions create writing genres, other social occasions create clothing genres. John places on the board some typical social occasions such as “wedding,” “job interview,” “high school prom,” “workday casual,” or “Halloween party” and invites discussion of appropriate kinds of dress. John wants students to see that social occasions create clothing expectations that operate as genres—invitations to dress in a certain way along with corresponding limits or constraints. One can express individuality at a job interview by choosing a particular style and quality of necktie or handbag but not by choosing a favorite sweatshirt or pair of flip‐flops. Similarly, one can express individuality in an APA research report by asking a particularly shrewd research question or developing an elegant methodology, but not by creating a fun cover page or organizing the report as a personal narrative.
To operate successfully in a written genre, students need to learn the genre's expectations, possibilities, limits, and constraints. Many of the questions that concern novice writers (such as Can we use “I” in our papers? or Do I need a thesis statement in the introduction?) are functions of the assigned genre rather than of the teacher's whims. But genres are more than a set of guidelines for formatting and style. According to some theorists, they are forms of “social action” (Miller, 1984)—that is, they help produce the ways that certain communities think and act (Bawarshi, 2003; Bazerman, 1987, 1988; Beaufort, 2007; Carter, 2007; MacDonald, 1994; Myers, 1986a; Nowacek, 2009; Russell, 1997; Russell and Yanez, 2003; Swales, 1990; Wardle, 2009). The concept of genre creates strong reader expectations, which in turn place demands on a writer to fulfill those expectations. When one writes in a certain genre, one's structure, style, and approach to subject matter are influenced by previous writers who have employed that same genre. The existence of the genre invites us to generate the ideas that meet the genre's expectations. Every genre is thus an invitation. For example, the existence of the genre “grant proposal” invites us to find problems that might be solved through grant funding. The existence of the genre “op‐ed piece” or “tweet” invites us to insert our own voices into the public arena.
It often takes years to become an expert user of a genre. Teachers in the physical and social sciences, for example, appreciate how difficult it is for a novice science student to understand the difference between the “Results” and “Discussion” sections of an experimental report, particularly to see how the “Discussion” section constructs an argument (usually drawing data from the “Results” section as evidence) that tries to answer the research question presented in the “Introduction,” a question that in turn grows out of the literature review and the scientist's theoretical orientation. As rhetorician Charles Bazerman has shown (1988), the genre of the experimental report helped constitute the practices of modern science (see also Greg Myers, 1985,1986b). This empirical way of thinking about the world, embodied in the genre of the research report, is what expert insider scientists, as teachers, must pass on to their new students. Other disciplines have analogous genres that embody their discipline's ways of thinking and that students must learn in order to become disciplinary insiders. In chapter 10 on teaching undergraduate research, we suggest strategies for teaching students how to write within the main genres of a discipline. But knowledge of genres is important even in introductory courses where students need to appreciate the difference between, say, an academic argument and a personal reflection, or a news story and an op‐ed column.
We conclude this section with one final point about genres: although some genres call for closed‐form prose, others call for alternative or open forms. Let us explain.
By closed‐form prose, we mean the kind of conventional thesis‐governed, points‐first
