Week 11 Blog Post

The two assigned readings this week, “Genres and How Writers and Readers Depend on Them,” and Miller, Devitt, and Gallagher’s “Genre: Permanence and Change,” explore the concept of genre and its application.

The first focus of the articles how one should critically examine a specific genre, breaking it down into its components so that a reader might better understand it. Some of these ways of thinking about genre include breaking it down into its situational, substantive, and stylistic characteristics, as well as considering its organizing principle. While these are useful ways to conceptualize genre, the article emphasizes the importance of not thinking of genre to rigidly. In a comparison to cartography, it is written that in the same way one should be able to read a map but should follow it blindly when it contradicts reality, one should be able to think in terms of genre while still recognizing that it is not such a simple task to neatly categorize writing.

Taking a step back, it is also explored how separate genres relate to one another with the introduction of two new categories, genre sets and genre systems. The former is described as a set relating to one specific task, whereas the latter is described as a set relating to a broader project or a set of several actions working towards the same end.

Finally, conceptualization of genre is broadened. It is emphasized that genre applies not just to works of writing, but can be applied across many modes of media, that genre is not a tool relegated to the field of rhetorical criticism, but can be made use of by many disciplines, and that genre is something that can have applied to it and be applied to different perspectives and approaches.

This year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) is currently being held, and there is of course a great deal of material which genre could be used to look at. Speeches, correspondence, coverage, receipts – it undoubtedly has produced a great deal of material of all different genres.