Understanding Genre

One of the ways we will be looking at writing this semester is through the idea of genre. Genre is a way of classifying anything that would fall under the large umbrella of art. That includes: art, music, movies, novels, and writing. 

To start, watch the video below for a more in-depth explanation of genre. I originally recorded this for a class I taught at EMU, so ignore the quick part at the beginning where I talk about it being for classes at Eastern. :-)

For the purposes of this class, anything type of writing is a genre. For example: newspaper articles, recipes, Biology notes, diary entries, essays, research papers, poetry, and even text messages. 

Each one of those types of writings, or genre, has a distinct way of being written. It has a style, tone and expected conventions. For example, a text message is generally short and to the point. "Correct" grammar usually isn't important, nor is spelling. Emojis and gifs are often used to express emotion and tone. Sometimes genres can even change the way we use grammar and punctuation. 

For example, read the following text message exchange:

While in an essay, it's expected that sentences will end in periods, in a text message, punctuation can completely change the message. Many people would read "I'm fine." as a different message than "I'm fine" -- the one with the period possibly suggesting the person is angry or irritated, and the second one meaning they are actually fine. 

These expectations are called conventions. They are the conventional or expected response to writing in a particular genre.  For another example, read the following text exchange:

The first message seems pretty standard, but the second message seems stilted and odd - more like what you might expect to read in a Victorian novel than a text message amongst friends. We notice when someone isn't using conventions correctly with genres we are familiar with, like texting. But we don't always know the conventions of genres we are unfamiliar with, like business reports or research papers. 

When we find ourselves needing to write in genres we aren't familiar with, it's important to be able to learn those conventions. One of the ways we can do that is by reading examples of that genre. If you started a new job and suddenly found yourself needing to write a TPS report, something you'd never heard of before, how might you go about figuring out how to do it? You could ask around for help, and hope that someone would sit down with you and show you, but you could also see if you had any already filled out reports laying around. If you looked at a sample of those, it would give you a good idea of how those were written, of the conventions of that genre.

For your first paper, you will choose a genre that interests you to analyze based on the conventions of the genre and the rhetorical situation, which we will cover next week.