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Genre Knowledge

  

You’re probably most familiar with the term genre with music or literature. Classical, jazz, hip hop, rock—these are all genres of music. Fiction, poetry, nonfiction are genres of literature, and of course there are sub-genres like memoir, science fiction, fantasy, etc. Yet, did you know that the term genre applies to a huge range of nonfiction writing like lab reports, resumes, obituaries, letters to the editor, reviews, recipes, etc.? A genre is a category or type of writing. Of course, as you know from Beaufort’s graphic of knowledge domains of writing shown earlier in this chapter that genres are determined by discourse communities. For example, the genre of a letter to family (like your Aunt Sally), though still a letter, will differ in a number of ways from a letter you write for a business (like to apply for a job).

TRY THIS to understand the concept of genre. Review some of the examples in this list of sample genres. Even without all of the A-Z headings, how could you still distinguish the various genres from one another? Are you already familiar with any of those genres? If so, what are they used for—what kinds of situations call for those types of texts?

You can think of genres as types, kinds, or categories of texts. Charles Bazerman describes genres as “self-reinforcing forms of communication”: “In creating typified forms or genres, we also come to typify the situations we find ourselves in” (316). The following passage adapted from the eBook Open English @ SLCC explains how this works.

Genre is a word we use when we want to classify things, to note the similarities and differences between kinds of writing. But we don’t identify genres solely by their formal markers. For instance, memoranda use a specific sort of header, and lab reports typically have commonly used section headings. But it’s not the header that makes a memorandum a genre (or subgenre); it’s not the section headings that make a lab report a genre (or subgenre). In other words, the formal features or markers don’t define the genre, although they are often helpful signals. Rather, it’s a situation in which the memorandum or the lab report typically recurs, and it’s also the fact that such situations seem to call repeatedly for a kind of writing that answers the needs of that situation. We begin to classify a kind of writing as a genre when it recurs frequently enough and seems to perform the same functions in recurring situations.

As you may have already guessed, the recurring situation that calls for a genre is within a discourse community. Beaufort describes discourse communities as “owning” particular texts (180). For Beaufort, what makes genres distinct from one another are their features, which include the following:

  • rhetorical purposes (audience, purpose, and context)
  • typical content
  • structural features
  • linguistic features (on the level of language)

Genres in Academic Discourse Communities

John Swales in his book Genre Analysis, shares the results of his studying academic texts. Specifically, he identifies features in the genre of a specific type of research article he examined. The following are a few of his findings:

Rhetorical purposes. Generally, for all of the research articles Swales studied the audience is other scholars and experts in the academic discourse community and the purpose is to inform, possibly secondarily to persuade.

Typical content. Swales goes into great detail describing the typical content of these scholarly research articles’ introductions. He develops a model that he calls Create a Research Space (CARS), and he discusses three moves each introduction makes (141). The first move is establishing a territory in which the article’s author generally discusses the topic and cites previous research. The second move is what Swales calls establishing a niche, which is where the author might go against or counter the other research, identify a gap in the research about the topic, raise questions, or add to the research. The third move for the introductions of the scholarly research articles Swales studied is occupying the niche, which is when the authors discuss their research for their article.

Structure. All of the scholarly research articles Swales studied followed the IMRD structure, which includes the following general sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion.

Linguistic. When it comes to particular words used in the articles Swales studied, he actually presents charts that break down the verb tenses and forms used by section of the article, as well as use of negative words. While he doesn’t study this, we can assume that each article had a ton of specialized language and vocabulary specific to that academic discipline.

Of course, there are many more genres of writing in academic discourse communities than the scholarly research articles Swales studied. Yet, viewing the various assignments you will write as genres that you can study will help you both when you need to write them and read them (discussed in the next chapter). Can I say “I” in this paper? Am I supposed to use passive voice? You can find answers by consulting examples of that genre in the discourse community for which you need to write.