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College Composition and Communication, 1996
ERIC ED346482 , 1992
The concept of genre should not be limited to literary genres, but should be expanded to include all types of texts, including those traditionally considered to be nonliterary. Essentially, many things about writing work the way they do because of genre, and a better understanding of genre can give us a better understanding of writing, reading and texts. Genre offers a great deal since it embodies a rhetorical situation and a discourse community. The form that a text takes represents writers' choices in response to a given situation. Genres allow teachers to see various types of values and audiences, and to generalize about communities and their situations. A better understanding of genre could have a powerful impact on an understanding of the processes of writing and of certain long-standing problems of composition theory. For example, study of the process of revision may be greatly clarified by bringing in issues of genre. Students might write better if they were given a better understanding of genre, allowing them to aim at a generic "ideal" text when revising. Writing instructors would do well to give more pedagogical and theoretical attention to genre than they currently do, starting with the plain fact that it is a powerful concept essential to any understanding of writing. (HB)
Cognition, Literature and History, 2014
The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and for Change, 2002
The concept of a theory of genre continues to be elusive. The criterion used for the generic classification of texts (both spoken and written) as belonging to given genres seems to continue to be clouded in ambivalence. Current scholarship in its divergence implicates criterion based on either communicative purpose (Swales, 1990: Chandler, 1997) or purpose and audience/discourse community. Other scholarship argues for a content based approach - often including the context as well - (Bhatia, 1981: Chandler, 1997) whereas others argue for a classification based on linguistic structure. On the other hand, recent scholarship has taken a more stylistic approach that adopts a features discrimination (Widdowson, 1998: Bhatia, 1981, Halliday 1994). This paper examines the weaknesses of these approaches working independent of each other and proposes an approach that synthesises tenets from mainstream genre analysis, discourse analysis and linguistic stylistics to create a holistic and more concrete approach to generic segmentation of texts. It argues that the creation of a theory should be based on an established/establishable ‘general bundle of tenets’ that explicate the primary concerns of the theory and that these should be concrete. It therefore adopts a discourse analysis – mainstream genre analysis – linguistic stylistics dialectic approach to suggest a possible ‘bundle’ of basic tenets for use in the generic discrimination of texts within a theory of genre. It suggests that ‘genre’ theorisation from the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) perspective offers a possible way out of the theoretical conflicts with ‘genre’ theory.
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