The Importance of Genre

Every time you ask students to write a “paper,” what you may not realize is that it’s an important opportunity to guide them in writing within a specific genre. “Genre” refers to the conventional combination of format, organization, purpose, and audience for specific types of writing—like how we know that a resume should have the applicant’s name in large font towards the top (so a hiring manager can quickly sort and select from many applications) and include section headings such as “Education” and “Work Experience” (so the manager can easily find relevant qualifications). Students aren’t just writing “papers” in their coursework—they are actually writing different genres in each class, and sometimes multiple genres within one class. Whether it is the subtle difference of a close reading or a critical analysis in different literature classes, or larger differences among writing business proposals, lab reports, and press releases, each genre that students encounter will have different expectations.

Designing assignments with specific genres in mind can help you explain to students how each of your assignments has specific expectations that are likely different from other papers they might be writing. Talking about genre expectations with students also helps prepare them for writing across different genres throughout their careers and personal lives.

Genre and Genre Analysis

Academic genres can include a wide variety of writing projects such as literature analyses, lab reports, business proposals, scholarship applications, and even emails. When thinking about how to teach such genres, you might be inclined to map out an exact formula of how to replicate them in format and appearance. However, scholarship in writing studies makes clear that successful writing in specific genres is more attuned to purpose and audience than merely formatting.

Throughout this guide, we define genre as a type of social action that recurs frequently enough to develop into recognizable forms.^[1] Consider, for instance, how lab reports as we know them today could not have simply appeared one day fully formed—rather, the genre developed its signature structure (introduction, methods, results, discussion) over hundreds of years of scientists striving to communicate their experimental findings to one another in stable, reliable ways.^[2] This means that adopting a specific genre to write in is a social action—each time we write within a genre we adjust that genre to meet the social factors such as our specific audience, the context in which we are writing, and our exact purpose in writing.

For another example, consider the more recent developments in the business memo genre: the shift (in many contexts) from paper memos sent to physical inboxes to email attachments sent digitally has affected what the memo looks like because its readers engage with the form differently. Emailed memos have less need for formal address lines, for example, and often include hyperlinks to websites for additional information. Memos will also always look slightly different depending on company, the expectations of specific readers, and the goal of the memo (such as a company-wide notice versus a memo requesting assistance from a specific department). Every genre we might write in is affected by the time and social context of the writing situation.

Genre analysis, then, looks at these different social situations and shows us how to analyze past examples to think about how to write within that genre. This means thinking through audience, context, and purpose for the genre. The following three questions can be useful for beginning a genre analysis:

What Genre Means for your Class

Even simple writing assignment will have different expectations such as the intended audience and how to develop a successful argument across different disciplines and even classes within a discipline. This means you should think of how to describe the audience, context, and purpose for each assignment in enough detail to your students that they will have the information to be able to successfully write the paper for your class. You can do this by writing a detailed assignment description (as described earlier in this chapter), discussing the expectations of the genre in class, and providing samples of either past students’ work or samples from authentic professional or academic contexts.

You might also consider asking your students to write in genres that align with specific learning outcomes for your class. For example, the “World Bank Letter” assignment (see the next page) asks students to write a letter to the President and Governors of the World Bank, which requires that they apply skills from the class in a more specific manner than if they wrote a research paper on the same topic. Having students write in genres that they will use outside of the university will help them prepare for specific writing scenarios they might encounter, but it also helps apprentice students into the field of study.^[3] Students learn more how to think like a chemist, for example, by writing a literature review in the style of what would be in a journal article than they would just writing an annotated bibliography.

Writing in specific genres can also be an action towards linguistic justice. When students write just a typical academic essay, their audience is usually seen as a highly privileged audience and we have traditionally expected that students write in a tone and dialect to match this expectation. However, when we ask students to write, for example, a news piece to be published in their home community about climate change, their audience is now their own community and they can choose the language that best suits this readership. Writing for their community allows marginalized students a chance to bring their personal experiences into the classroom as an asset rather than a deficit. No matter the genre, providing a specific genre with designated readers, context, and purpose gives students a specific reason to choose the dialect appropriate to the genre rather than setting the arbitrary standard of Standard Academic English.