Communicative and Sociological Orientations to Genre
Rhetorical Criticism and Genre
Social Phenomenology and Typification
Genre as Social Action
The French and Swiss Genre Traditions and the Brazilian Genre Synthesis
Genres as Forms of Situated Cognition
Uptake and Relations between Genres
Genre Sets and Genre Systems
Genre and Distributed Cognition
Meta-genres
Genre and Activity Systems
Conclusion
7 Genre Research in Academic Contexts
Research on Genre Learning and Acquisition in Academic Contexts
Taking up the Call for Research on Genre Knowledge and Learning
Research on How Genre Knowledge Translates to Performance
Intercultural Research on Genre within Academic Settings
Research on Genres and Advanced Academic Literacies
8 Genre Research in Workplace and Professional Contexts
Research into Genre Learning in the Workplace
Research on Workplace Genres: Constructing, Distributing, and Negotiating Knowledge
Historical Studies of Professional Genres
Research Studies of Genre Systems in the Workplace
Ethnographic Studies of Workplace Genres
Research on Conflict and Change in Professional/Workplace Contexts
9 Genre Research in Public and New Media Contexts
Research on Public Genres: Constructing and Maintaining Knowledge
Historical Research on Public Genres
Research Studies of Genre Systems in Publics
Research on the Mediation of Individual and Public Action
Research on Genres and New Media
Studies of New Media Genres in Academic Contexts
Genre-based Studies of Weblogs in Academic Settings
Studies of Electronic Genres in Workplace Contexts
Conclusion
10 From Research to Pedagogy: Multiple Pedagogical Approaches to Teaching Genres
Multiple Pedagogical Approaches to Genre
Implicit Genre Pedagogies
Freedman’s Model for Acquiring New Genres
Explicit Genre Pedagogies
Checklist for Using Swales’s Moves in a Research Paper Introduction
Interactive Genre Pedagogies
Guimarães’s Didactic Sequence for Genre of the Detective Story
11 Rhetorical Genre Studies Approaches to Teaching Writing
RGS Pedagogies and the Transfer of Genre Knowledge
RGS Approaches to Teaching Genre Analysis
Teaching Critical Awareness of Genre
Teaching the Production of Alternative Genres
Teaching Genres in Their Contexts of Use
Guidelines for Observing and Describing Scenes
Teaching Genres in Public Contexts
Teaching Genre in Disciplinary Contexts: A Genre Approach to WAC/WID
Conclusion
Series Editor’s Preface
Charles Bazerman
The longer you work with genre, the more it reveals and the more it connects with—perhaps because genre is at a central nexus of human-sense-making, where typification meets utterance in pursuit of human action. To communicate effectively we need to know what kind of situation we are in, what kinds of things are being said, and what kinds of things we want to accomplish. The evolving variety of human circumstances, the creative potentials of language, and the cleverness of human action challenge us to know where we are and where we are going in interactions, especially since we must be intelligible to other people equally struggling to make sense of communicative situations from their separate perspectives. Shared social attributions of genre help us and those we communicate with to be on the same page, or close enough for our practical purposes.
Many aspects of communication, social arrangements, and human meaning-making are packaged in genre recognition. Genres are associated with sequences of thought, styles of self-presentation, author-audiences stances and relations, specific contents and organizations, epistemologies and ontologies, emotions and pleasures, speech acts and social accomplishments. Social roles, classes, institutional power are bound together with rights and responsibilities for producing, receiving, and being ruled by genres. Genres shape regularized communicative practices that bind together organizations, institutions, and activity systems. Genres by identifying contexts and plans for action also focus our cognitive attention and draw together the dynamics of our mind in pursuit of specific communicative relations, thereby exercising and developing particular ways of thinking. I would not be surprised if brain researchers were to find that typification and genre leave their mark on brain organization as the child matures into an articulate and literate adult.
By following genres we can see both the complex regularities of communicative life and the individuality of each situated utterance. Awareness of robust types and purposeful individual variation responsive to local circumstances provides an antidote to over-simplifying models of writing instruction. Genre helps us see the purposefulness and flexibility of form, rather than form being just a matter of correctness and fulfillment of a few school-based tasks, created purely for instruction and assessment. A proper understanding of genre also reveals the underlying communicative action and social