Digital Genre Analysis

Students analyze a digital genre by making something digital themselves. The questions behind it: what do people accomplish when they use this genre, and what shapes does it take given what they’re trying to accomplish? The lesson is that form follows function, and that making a genre analysis teaches you something about making the genre.

Picking a genre

Students collect 5–10 instances of one digital genre: videos, podcast episodes, threads, blog posts. Tips from the sheet:

• Pick something you can actually collect. Some genres are interesting but hard to gather five samples of.
• Don’t go too broad. “YouTube videos” is too broad: vlogs, tutorials, and reviews are different genres. “Social media memes” is too broad too. Instagram Reels about one subject by individuals would work, and Reels by companies are probably a related but different genre.
• Pick a genre with variety. No two TikToks look quite alike, which gives the analysis something to compare.

The analysis

Students sort what they find into four categories:

• Situational elements. What situations call for this genre? What’s the exigence? Who usually makes it?
• Substantive characteristics (content). What do these texts tend to say? What’s usually present, or missing?
• Stylistic characteristics (form). Length, layout, visuals, audio, organization, specialized terms, tone.
• Organizing principles. What makes the genre a genre? “If I took out this characteristic, would it still be recognizable as this genre?”

The digital piece then tells the story of the genre. Where is it most often used? Which features are required for it to be recognizable, and which are optional because only some samples have them? What order should the analysis walk through them in?

The piece and the defense

The digital piece can be a video, a podcast, a slideshow, a webpage, or something similar. It has to substantially use at least three of the five modes, and one of them has to be language. For video or audio, I recommend no more than 5–10 minutes, and students outline the analysis on a single page or slide before they start building.

The Rhetorical Choices Defense is a separate piece of writing, in language alone, explaining the choices the student made in the digital piece. It has to make good rhetorical choices of its own, like citing appropriate sources. This is the hinge of the project: it turns the multimodal work back into written reasoning.

What makes it good

The best analyses have:

• an introduction that poses the main question, names the genre, and previews the findings and the path through them
• a graphical example of the genre, or part of it
• a clear account of who uses the genre and why
• conclusions built on comparing several instances
• accurate assessments of the genre’s elements
• a logical progression through those elements
• a conclusion that answers the main question
• citations in MLA or APA

How it runs

In a 15-week online course, the draft is due in Week 10 and the final in Week 11, with a 250–500 word defense. In an 8-week asynchronous course, the draft is due in Week 7 and the final in Week 8 with the portfolio, and the defense runs 500–1,000 words.

If you pair this with a standing-challenges paper, use the conversation version of that project. The corpus version repeats this project’s method.