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Applying Genre Knowledge to Writing

  

What does it mean to have genre knowledge? Knowledge of the standard genres used in the discourse community and genres’ following features:

  • rhetorical – to include purpose, audience, and context
  • typical content – kinds of information the text includes
  • structural – the parts or sections of the text and their order
  • linguistic – the kinds of language used (Beaufort 221)

Why as a writer should you care about genre? You’ll find as a writer that sometimes a genre will make your life easier—you may know exactly where everything in the document is supposed to go, for example. Other times you might find a particular genre constraining—you may think it doesn’t make sense to organize the document that way. The following passages adapted from the eBook Open English @ SLCC discuss how genre works in more detail.

Sometimes when you write, the genre is a choice that’s already made for you. But there are also times when you’ll have opportunities to decide upon the genres you’ll use to write in the world, and often this will be true in the writing classes you take. This requires some critical imagination and research on your part—imagining the writing situation, and the genres that might respond well in that situation. Thus, genres are both stable and to some degree fluid and evolving, just as human communication itself is both predictable and unpredictable.

Knowing about genre can provide powerful insight into how writing works in the world. We know from a fair amount of empirical study that writers learn to use genres best within contexts where they use the genres regularly—the genres in use within a particular locale will become part of the toolset writers within those locales pick up to do their work there. But even in your writing courses, you should start to become more aware of the genres that are built into the settings in which you currently find yourself—school, work, public life—as well as genres that are at work in other settings you want to be a part of.

Prewriting for Genre Knowledge

  • What genres are available and/or expected in this discourse community?
  • What do I know about them and what do I need to know?
  • What are their rhetorical purposes (audience, purpose, context), typical content, structural features, and linguistic (language) features?
  • What constraints will each genre present? What kinds of opportunities will they provide?
  • Which genre(s) should I choose and why—do I have a choice?

When genre knowledge gets messy. . . Have you ever noticed how clean and neat some ideas look in, well, textbooks, but in practice they get messy? Genre, as a knowledge domain for writing, can be messy for you as a college student.

For one thing, it’s safe to say that there aren’t really any pure genres; they are not perfect and exact. Remember that genres across various discourse communities will be different to fit the specific situations for which they are needed. For example, an instructor in one of your classes may require a writing project fit a particular lab report genre; however, they might have something specific structurally they want you to do for their class. You may even be assigned to write in what Wardle calls “mutt genres,” with mixed and unclear—even contradictory—purposes and audiences (774).

In addition, genres are not formulas. As the following passages adapted from the eBook Open English @ SLCC indicate, you are not a robot when it comes to genre.

With all this genre knowledge you’re developing, are you just a little worried that you’re basically going to be a borg, scrolling through your limited options in a nano-second, the choices all but made for you?

You might appreciate Charles Bazerman’s thoughts on this: “the view of genre that simply makes it a collection of features obscures how these features are flexible in any instance or even how the general understanding of the genre can change over time, as people orient to evolving patterns.” For instance, Bazerman goes on, “Students writing papers for courses have a wide variety of ways of fulfilling the assignment, and may even bend the assignment as long as they can get their professor … to go along with the change.” In other words, genres evolve and change over time, and each user taking up a genre takes it up just a little bit differently. Genres help writers get things done: they are durable text-types that people use repeatedly for similar communicative acts. Knowing about genres, being sensitive to the genres that are a part of a particular situation, and becoming a capable user of those genres makes you a more flexible and adaptable writer.