Genres are categories for composition, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter. Pop, jazz, and heavy metal are examples of music genres; romance, horror, and magical realism are examples of literary genres; manuals, reports, blog posts, resumés, letters, emails, Tweets, and medical journal articles are examples of writing genres.

Genres do not exist in a vacuum but emerge from different communities’ needs, desires, and distinct rhetorical situations. For example, the scientific method was developed by wealthy men in Europe in the eighteenth century who were dedicated to Enlightenment ideals of empirical rationality and determined to understand the material world according to universal laws. Over time, so that their experiments could be replicated amongst themselves and thus “proven,” they developed through their letters the scientific method—-a genre we recognize today of questions, research, hypotheses, experiments, data analysis, and conclusions (Bazerman). As another example, in the late 19th and early 20th century, across Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States, epic corridos sung in town squares and other gathering places developed as a genre as a way to quickly and covertly spread news of state military violence against Mexican and U.S. citizens and engender resistance for the developing revolution (Paredes).

Genres create and depend upon community-established standards and expectations. They signal belonging to particular communities. A song artist who wishes to be seen as an Americana folk singer is going to use similar instruments, chord progressions, and subject matter as other Americana folk music to identify themselves as belonging to this particular music community. A politician who wishes to be identified with a particular political party is going to write speeches, market their campaigns, create slogans, and debate in ways that align with their audiences’ expectations and with other texts produced by their chosen political party. A student who want to go to graduate school for psychology emulates the voice, methods, jargon, and text structures used in psychology journals. Writing genre expert Amy Devitt tells us, “Genre exists through people’s individual rhetorical actions at the nexus of the contexts of situation, culture, and genres” (Writing Genres 31).

Carolyn Miller, a leading professor in the field of technical communication, argues that “a rhetorically sound definition of genre must be centered . . . on the action it is used to accomplish” (151). In other words, knowing what a genre is used for can help people to accomplish a goal, whether that goal is getting a job by knowing how to write a stellar resume, winning a person’s heart by writing a romantic love letter, or getting into graduate school by writing an effective personal statement. Genres are tools writers use for structuring communicative content more efficiently and effectively because 1) many composition decisions regarding organization or voice, etc. have been decided by the genre and 2) they utilize what audiences already expect and know to make/strengthen connections.

Imagine writing a science report without genre. Where would all the data go? Where do your research questions belong and do you even write research questions or do you just say “I wanna know how the sky works”? How would you describe your methods? Would you put your findings in your introduction or your methods before your hypothesis or the questions you wanted to ask at the end? What kind of words would you use? Do you tell a story about you personally came to be invested in this research? Do you describe in detail what the burner smelled like as you heated the copper? What metric do you use to describe blood loss or propeller length? And how on earth would your reader know where to find the information they wanted to find if they didn’t have time to read the entire report? Genre answers many of these questions for us. It does some of the thinking, planning, and decision-making that go into writing for us as writers and as readers.

(BTW, those five paragraph exam essay you wrote in high school? That’s a genre.)

Genres in Action

By this point you might realize that you have been participating in genres your whole life—whether you are telling a joke, reading a fairy tale, writing an email, or posting on Instagram. Because you know how these genres function as social actions, you can accurately predict how they function rhetorically; your joke should generate a laugh, your email should elicit a response, and your updated Facebook status should generate comments from your online friends. Possibly without even thinking about it, you were recognizing the rhetorical situation and choosing to act in a manner that would result in the outcome you desired.

Knowing what is appropriate in these situations helps you make effective decisions as a speaker and respond appropriately as an audience member. Devitt argues that “people do not label a particular story as a joke solely because of formal features but rather because of their perception of the rhetorical action that is occurring” (Writing Genres 11). That is, we get the joke (or don’t) because of the degree to which we understand key elements of the story, from context to format. True, genres often have formulaic features, but these features can change even as the nature of the genre remains the same (Devitt, Writing Genres 48). What is important to consider here is that if mastering a form were simply a matter of plugging in content, we would all be capable of successfully writing in any genre when we are given a formula.

Fortunately, even if you have been taught to write in a formulaic way, you probably don’t treat texts in a strictly formulaic manner. When approaching a genre for the first time, you likely view it as more than a simple form. That is, we treat texts that we encounter as rhetorical objects; we choose between horror movies and rom-coms  not only because we are familiar with the forms but because we know what response they will elicit from us (nail-biting fear and dreamy sighs, respectively). The bottomline is that all genres matter because all genres shape our everyday lives.

Genre, Audience, and Purpose

Writers adhere to and also break genre expectations to make certain connections with audiences and fulfill certain purposes. Conventionally, newspaper articles as a genre use their headlines to 1) get the reader’s attention using snappy language, 2) succinctly describe to the reader what the article is about, and 3) establish key facts related to the article topic. Fake news articles work similarly but with a twist. They rely on audience’s expectation that headlines are factual to make lies sound real. They push even harder for reader attention with loaded, emotional, and often hyperbolic language. They say what the article is about but often choose the most salacious aspect rather than summarizing the entire event. In these ways, fake news articles adhere to conventional news genres and also break them to make different kinds of connections.

While we may not think of genre as rhetorical, genre is in fact another tool for persuasion. And whenever we’re working with something rhetorical, we’ve got to think about our specific purpose and a specific audience. Each time we write or communicate, we’re relying on particular audience expectations and desires in order to be successful in that writing and communication.

Here’s how this might play out with a medium we interact with regularly: movies. Let’s say that we are watching The Proposal, a rom-com featuring an executive who falls for her assistant. What do we expect to happen? First of all, we expect to laugh, right? We also expect that after some foolish  situations, a few obstacles, and a little character growth, the protagonists would end up falling for one another. In an alternate scenario, let’s say we are watching SuperBad, a coming-of-age story of two friends—Evan and Fogell—about to leave for college but not before a night of mishaps  involving such plot twists as a fake ID incident before Evan wins his true love’s heart. What would we expect to happen in this young-adult, “buddy” movie? First, we expect it to be funny, right? Second, we expect various shenanigans to occur as a result of Fogell’s mistake with the fake ID. Both comedies include a clear romantic  plot and silly situations that produce humorous moments the audience can relate to. However, these movies are considered to be different genres. Why? Because their target audience and purpose shifts the ways their stories are structured and told.

Analyzing vs. Composing in Genres

Analyzing

Analyzing a genre means paying close attention to the writer’s choices and thinking about the group of texts and group of humans to which they do or desire to belong. We can successfully analyze genres by examining the author’s stance, key moves the author makes, the text layout, design, organization, and structure, the use of language and style, evidence from outside sources, and other elements to help us determine how the author’s choices communicate information within genre expectations.

To understand genre, we first need to identify the key elements of a text and how those elements might change between genres. Texts feature information like a title, author, publication date, venue, and other elements that we can recognize in one genre and analyze across genres.

To analyze genres, we need to use active reading skills to determine the complex textual elements at work. For example, we can easily identify an author of a piece using the byline, but analyzing the author’s stance is a more in-depth task. An author’s stance is the attitude that the writer has toward the topic of their message (“Stance and Language”). To analyze genres, we also must read across texts to understand

• what they have in common that makes them a genre
• and where they are different to better understand who the speaker is, who they want to address, and what they want to say

Analyzing a genre means paying close attention to the writer’s choices. We can successfully analyze genres by examining the author’s stance, key moves the author makes, the text layout, design, organization, and structure, the use of language and style, evidence from outside sources, and other elements to help us determine how the author’s choices communicate information within genre expectations.

Composing

On the other hand, to compose in a genre means making these specific choices that you might have already analyzed. We can compare these experiences to the differences between reviewing a movie versus creating a movie. It’s a reviewer’s job to determine what makes a movie worth watching or avoiding and explain the reasons for such an analysis to the reader. Let’s examine how acclaimed reviewer Roger Ebert wrote about reviewing Adam Sandler’s remake of The Longest Yard:

I often practice a generic approach to film criticism, in which the starting point for a review is the question of what a movie sets out to achieve. “The Longest Yard” more or less achieves what most of the people attending it will expect. Most of its audiences will be satisfied enough when they leave the theater, although few will feel compelled to rent it on video to share with their friends. (Ebert, “‘Yard’ Catches an Outside Pass”)

We can see in this excerpt that Ebert recognizes his own role as reviewer is to capture what a movie sets out to achieve—in short, how it might work within genre expectations. We can see that most clearly when Ebert describes the movie as “a fair example of what it is,” which in this case means a comedic remake. When you analyze genres, remember that you don’t have to like what you analyze, but instead appreciate the object of analysis for what it is trying to accomplish. But when you compose in genres, remember that you’re the moviemaker—your writing shows your reader what you hope to achieve in your chosen genre.

Recognizing Corollary Genres

Writing in different genres can help us see the connections and overlap among genres. Some writing genres have similar expectations to them, like journaling and blogging, but different audiences. Other writing genres might have variations based on how people have used these genres, like comic books and graphic novels, where subtle changes can make huge differences in how audiences perceive the writing. A corollary genre is a concept that can help us recognize similar writing strategies used across related  genres.

What is a corollary genre and why does it matter? As defined by the Genres Across Borders network, a corollary genre is “a genre variation engendered when actors revise some of the discursive qualities and expectations of a particular genre but do not completely transform the genre itself. Such modifications bring about derivative or ‘corollary’ genres.” Genres are adaptable, in other words, to suit new purposes and audiences. The scientific method, for example, has been evolved across time and the academy to suit the needs of different academic disciplines from “hard sciences” like medicine and aerospace engineering to “soft sciences” like psychology and sociology. In the context of first-year writing courses, corollary genres help us determine the different kinds of writing moves you’ll want to make as you compose.

Corollary genres also help us connect similar kinds of information and expectations in multiple genres. As we discussed above, genre expectations can determine how and what information we frame for the reader. You’ll write in a variety of genres in your writing courses and life, so it’s important to ask: what is the bigger communicative purpose for this particular genre? Who is the specific audience? Corollary genres help us resolve these questions! For example, journals, blogs, movie reviews, and narratives are all examples of critical reflection, which asks writers to consider the significance of their experiences and communicate that significance by telling specific stories. If we’re writing in one of these corollary genres, we’ll need to reflect on important information and communicate the significance of that information to our reader.

Grouping Genres

But as we mentioned earlier with our research paper example, we can group genres and corollary genres by their common features and expectations. Think about holiday films. Whatever winter holiday you celebrate, some networks like to air marathons of films connected to the Christmas holiday. Amazingly, Christmas movies can range from the romantic comedy Love Actually to the action film, Die Hard. Both films take place around the Christmas holiday and have key plot elements related to Christmas. Love Actually, as a romantic comedy, includes its fair share of Santa costumes and awkward gift-giving scenarios that get the characters into trouble. Alternatively, Die Hard takes place during a Christmas party that gets crashed by some burglars and results in a lot of Christmas-related action scenes.

While the debate over whether Die Hard “counts” as a Christmas movie continues to this day, in the context of this chapter, we can recognize how the genre of holiday films is interestingly expanded by its inclusion. Ultimately, corollary genres show us that genres are not monolithic—they contain varied examples that are connected by common  features and expectations.

Writing across Genres

As demonstrated in previous sections in this chapter, our understanding of corollary genres evolves constantly. However, most genres  rely on these key building blocks: summarizing, analyzing, synthesizing, and using multiple communication modes. Why do you need to master these skills? First, these skills are foundational to many composing tasks. In fact, they’re so useful across genres that you can apply these skills to a variety of situations in the classroom, at work, and in everyday life. Second, these skills build in complexity from summary to analysis to synthesis; multimodality also ranges from simple to complex as you gain confidence. Therefore, once you learn these skills, you will be better prepared to make complex arguments, problem solve, and communicate persuasively. In the next sections, we outline these foundational skills.

Attributions

Bazerman, Charles. “Scientific writing as a social act: A review of the literature of the sociology of science.” New essays in technical and scientific communication (2019): 156-184.

“Corollary Genre,” Genres Across Borders, CC-BY-NC-SA, https://genreacrossborders.org/gxb-glossary/corollary-genre.

Miller, Carolyn R. “Rhetorical community: The cultural basis of genre.” Genre and the new rhetoric 6778 (1994).

Paredes, Américo. ” With His Pistol in His Hand” A Border Ballad and Its Hero. University of Texas Press, 1958.