Like movies and books, music is often grouped by genre. How many musical genres can you name?

One important way to empower yourself as a reader (and also a writer) is to learn how to understand genres. The word “genre” (pronounced “john-ruh” with a soft j, like “zhaan-ruh”) comes from the French and roughly means type, kind, category, or class (in keeping with the fact that it’s related to the Latin word genus, which you might recognize from biology). You’re probably already familiar with the term in connection with movies, which are grouped into various genres: horror, Western, drama, romantic comedy, documentary, and so on. Music, as well, has genres: you’ve probably heard of hip-hop, jazz, pop, rap, and rock… but how about glitch hop, vaporwave, lowercase, or pirate metal? Genres can be quite broad, like popular music or instrumental music, or very specific, like soukous or vegan straight edge.

Have you ever watched a movie where you have no idea what the genre is? It can be pretty disconcerting. You don’t know whether you should get ready to laugh, cry, or scream. Similarly, when you go to read something, it can be helpful to know something about the genre in advance. Your approach will change depending on whether you’re reading a research paper, a blog post, a novel, or a grocery list. Each of the four types of writing just named represents a genre (type, category). You can probably think of many more, from biographies to self-help books to cookbooks. (This brings up an important point: “Genre” can refer to the overall form of a text, such as a novel or a textbook, or it can refer to a specific subcategory of that form, such as a mystery novel or a math textbook. Here, we’re more concerned with the first of these, genre-as-form.)

Genres help us communicate better both as readers and as writers. As a reader, you can understand text more easily by developing genre awareness. For example, when you pick up a biography, you know it’s going to tell the life story of a real person, so you approach it with a different set of expectations than you would a novel, which tells a fictional story. If you mistook a biography for a novel, you’d fundamentally misconstrue what you were reading. On the writer’s end, genre awareness helps to plan, organize, and craft the text better, because each genre embodies a set of rules and guidelines for fulfilling a specific purpose and meeting readers’ expectations.

Not incidentally, that’s also your best working definition as we move forward: A genre represents a pattern or set of rules that a given text follows in order to communicate its message effectively to its intended audience. When you read any written text, the aspects of rhetoric that you may have learned about in previous composition classes—purpose, audience, context, and so on—lead you to approach the reading with a certain set of expectations. The concept of genre encompasses these things and provides the added benefit of a pattern or “recipe” for you to follow.

The first step to enjoying this benefit is simply to become more genre-aware. Learn to recognize that virtually everything you read follows the rules of a certain genre. Use this recognition to approach and attack your reading more enjoyably and intelligently.

The Goals and Purposes of Different Academic Genres

The key to understanding a genre is first to understand its purpose. Each genre sets out to accomplish something specific. For example, as mentioned above, the purpose of any biography is to tell someone’s life story. You have to understand this at the outset to understand what you’re reading.

You’ll improve your success as a college student if you understand the goals and purposes of the genres that you’re most likely to encounter in the college setting. These include textbooks, scholarly articles, reference works, journalism, and works of literature. Each of these displays typical features that are related to its primary purpose.

	Textbooks The primary purpose of any textbook, regardless of its subject, is to educate the reader. This is clear from their typical characteristics, which include: a clearly bounded scope clear organizational structures the incorporation of specific educational aids an internally consistent and repetitive style the occasional use of second-person language to talk directly to the reader in an educational/instructional “voice”
	Scholarly Articles The purpose of scholarly articles is to disseminate new knowledge in academic and scientific fields and/or to offer new perspectives on existing knowledge. They’re written by professional scholars and graduate students and published in scholarly journals, which are peer-reviewed periodicals devoted to specific fields of academic study. (Peer review means that before publication each article is examined by other scholars in the same field, who provide revision advice to the author.) To fulfill this purpose, scholarly articles typically do the following: They advance a central claim and argument. They present original research by the author(s) that is intended to identify a gap or lack in current knowledge. They use a formal tone and academic language. They make heavy use of an academic citation system. They present an abstract (summary) of the article’s content at the start.
	Reference Works The purpose of reference works is to provide specific information in response to a current knowledge need. Examples include encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, indexes, bibliographies, handbooks, almanacs, directories, and online databases. Like textbooks, reference works can teach the reader something. Like scholarly articles, they present knowledge (sometimes new) and may contain peer-reviewed information. But unlike these others, reference works are intended to serve as a ready resource for having on hand at a moment’s need. This is why they often present information in alphabetical order. Examples of reference works: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (and also merriam-webster.com) Wikipedia The World Book Encyclopedia The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy Stedman’s Medical Dictionary
	Journalism The purpose of journalism is to inform or persuade. The most common sources of textual journalism are newspapers, magazines, and news websites (although there is also book-length journalism). Articles are written by reporters for the purpose of reporting news and events. They’re purely informative; they take a “just-the-facts” approach and present information objectively, without opinion, about a variety of subjects, including politics, technology, news, the economy, sports, and entertainment. Common characteristics of journalistic articles include: use of the “inverted pyramid” approach to organizing information, which presents information in descending order of importance, beginning with the broadest facts (the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the story) and then narrowing to the more specific (the details). an objective point of view a simple and streamlined writing style (not “literary”) a central focus on current events at the time of publication inclusion of direct quotations from people involved in the events being described, including, especially, public figures such as politicians, businesspeople, athletes, and educators By contrast, op-eds and columns are written by editors, columnists, and other writers to convince readers of certain viewpoints. They’re persuasive; they contain facts, but they also contain opinions, and they often argue on one side or another of a controversial current issue. Examples of journalistic publications in the United States: The New York Times The Wall Street Journal Newsweek Time magazine Politico Your local newspaper
	Literature The purpose of literature is to entertain, inspire, provide meaning, or otherwise engage the mind, emotions, and imagination of the reader. Literature includes fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction. Typical characteristics of literary writing include: the creative and artistic use of language the presence of symbolism and metaphor the use of narrative (storytelling) The other genres mentioned here often contain narratives, too, but they use them in ways that differ from literary works, which tell stories not to impart factual information but to entertain and engage the imagination. Examples of literature include the following Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse (novel) The short stories of Flannery O’Connor “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou (poetry) The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by Shakespeare (drama)

A Note about Academic Genres

When thinking about genres, remember two things about the reading and writing that you’ll do in this class, and also in the entirety of your college career.

First, academic writing forms of its own subset of genres. In a composition class, you may read texts belonging to any or all of the genres you’ve been learning about here. You may also write texts in a variety of genres, including genres that have been developed mainly for classroom learning purposes, such as the five-paragraph essay, the informative research paper, and the persuasive research paper. As you learned in the first section of this module, there’s also an entire world of professional academic/scholarly writing. Student academic writing and professional scholarly writing both follow their own sets of genre recipes for producing writing with specific characteristics to fulfill specific purposes within the educational context.

Second, academic writing is not intrinsically more intelligent, more important, or otherwise “better” than other types of writing. Rather, it’s just one subset of genres among many. It’s a collection of genres that are useful within their intended contexts, for their given purposes. And as with any genre, to be successful in academic ones, it’s simply the case that you need to become familiar with their rules and patterns (such as the use of an academic citation format — MLA, APA, Chicago style, or another — when writing a research paper or scholarly article).