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First-year writing · the multimodal unit
Genres & Conventions
Writing with a purpose for an audience
This talk is about two words that come up all semester: genre, the kind of thing a piece of writing is, and conventions, what readers of that kind of thing expect to find in it.
Whether we write a more “traditional” paper or do something more multimodal, we need to start thinking about our rhetorical decisions while engaging in the “genres” of academic writing and the research process.
Every project in the course asks for rhetorical decisions, whether it ends up as an essay or as something multimodal. Genre is where those decisions start.
What is “genre?”
Where something is on a bookshelf in a book store?
What “category” a piece of writing fits into?
Most students arrive with the bookstore answer: genre as a shelf or a category. It isn’t wrong, just not the whole story, and the reading takes it further.
“Types of texts have recognizable names because they are kinds of writing that recur, happening over and over because they facilitate regularly occurring functions in life” (Wardle and Downs 34).
“Resumes, wedding invitations, birthday cards, parking tickets, textbooks, novels, text messages, magazine cover stories, eulogies, Instagram posts, feasibility reports, lyrics – these are all kinds of writing that help us participate in constantly recurring events” (Wardle and Downs 34).
“If a particular writing situation happens repeatedly, prompting writers to need to respond again and again (for example, the need to apply for a job), then certain kinds of writing come into existence to respond to that recurring situation (like resumes)” (Wardle and Downs 34).
Wardle and Downs define a genre by what it does. It exists because a situation keeps coming back and people keep needing to respond to it, which is why a résumé, a wedding invitation, and a parking ticket each look the way they do.
“When you encounter new writing situations and contexts, genres ensure that you aren’t completely on your own in a strange world. Genres are helpful but flexible guides for understanding and approaching new writing situations. They provide maps, if you know to look for them and can figure out how to read them” (Wardle and Downs 36).
This is the image the rest of the talk builds on: a genre as a map for a writing situation you haven’t been in before.
Genres have “conventions.” Conventions are the “paths” you’re looking for in the “map.” They are “shortcuts” to understanding how to make something in a particular genre.
If a genre is the map, its conventions are the paths already worn into it. Following them is a shortcut to making something its readers recognize.
Drawings, not the real covers
Three books, three genres: a novel, a book of advice for writers, and a textbook. What does each one’s cover promise a reader before they open it?
An academic article has conventions too: a title that names its subject, an opening that places it among other studies, and sources cited throughout. Sommers’s study of how students and experienced writers revise is a good one to look through.
Lyiscott moves among three ways of speaking English in one talk, each with conventions of its own, and chooses among them for her audience and purpose.
You make “rhetorical decisions” (writing decisions) with audience and purpose in mind, both of which “genre” plays a major role in.
running late!! save me a seat 🙏
Subject: Arriving late to class today
Hi Professor Howard,
My bus is delayed, so I’ll be about ten minutes late. I’ll catch up on what I miss.
Thank you, Jordan
TO: Front desk team RE: Late arrival, 9 a.m. shift
I’ll arrive at 9:15. Maria has agreed to cover the desk until then.
Conventions: No greeting or sign-off, lowercase, an emoji, sent the moment it’s typed.Conventions: A subject line, a greeting with a title, a reason, an offer to catch up, a sign-off.Conventions: TO and RE lines instead of a greeting, the time first, the fix stated, no sign-off.
Sample messages, written by Claude
Same news, three genres. Switch between them on the slide: everything that changes was decided by who’s reading and why.
In your workshop groups, discuss:
What “genre” does your project fall into?
Are you adhering to the conventions of your “genre?”
Each group names the genre of its own project, then checks the project against that genre’s conventions: which ones it follows, and which it breaks, on purpose or not.
Readings
Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, Writing About Writing, 5th ed., pp. 34–36
Nancy Sommers, "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers" (1980)
Jamila Lyiscott, "3 Ways to Speak English," TED (2014)