Genres: Shapes of Meaning

In the Robert Heinleins science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, an orphan Earthling
conceived in space but raised on Mars without human contact returns to Earth as an adult. There, amidst
these alien humans, he struggles to make sense out of the native
culture he had never imagined. Heinlein coined the work grok in that
novel, which means in Martian to drink and in the culture of Mars
to understand intuitively and be at one with. He adapts to life on a
new planet by trying to grok Earth experiences by associating them
with similar life conditions from Mars. This understanding is always
approximate, for there are some Earth ways he cannot grok, such as
taking a bath, because Martian life on a desert planet had no
experience that explained such an exorbitant use of water. So taking
his first bath almost caused a coronary attack brought on from fear
and lack of understanding.
For the rest of us, people in the real word, the ability to
deeply understand and operate successfully in our native culture is
not a struggle because we have conceptions of our life-world that
weve gained through living in it. From childhood on, people take in the situations around them and learn
the repeated patterns. If this were not so, the very sanity of existence might be jeopardized because all our
mental, emotional, and physical energies would have to be constantly used in merely watching and trying
to figure out the world operating around us. Since my life involves private and public activities that
intersect with other people, I constantly use my perceptions of life when I experience any of the myriads
of situations that make up my world.
I dont have to wonder how to conduct myself or what to expect of others every time, say, I walk
into a restaurant, because the skill of how to do a restaurant has congealed into an invisible pattern in
my mind that informs my actions when I go out to eat. I can function at a new restaurant because Ive
been to other restaurants and I know how they work. The very word inform is made up of the two parts
that explain this acquisition of culture: the social knowledge has been formed inside my head by the
repetition of my exposure to it. I have a conceptual form in mind that I act out when I perform typical
social actions. Yet Im hardly aware that I possess this knowledge, knowledge which translates into the
ability to function socially, because social understanding and acculturated behaviors are so internalized
that they operate as if they were natural. Our social knowledge seems so obvious that we no longer
consider how we came to know it: we just go out and live our lives. In doing so, we carry around these
mental patterns and constantly act them out, which of course only makes them seem more natural and

sensible to us. But the very desire to go out to eat, for instance, comes from somewhere. The wish to eat
out is a culturally constructed possibility that the cultural scene of a restaurant put into your head. If you
were raised in a place where no restaurants existed and none of the people you knew ever ate out, you
would not feel the need or the desire to go to a public place and expect someone you dont know to cook
for you in exchange for money. These repeated patterns of social understanding that get acted out over
and over again can be called genres.
But dont let that word mislead you. Probably you think of genre as just a form, a category like
the shelves at Blockbuster video (comedy, drama, cartoon) or a text type from literature (poem, short
story, drama). Recently, scholars have reconceptualized the meaning and the theory behind genre. Carolyn
Miller, one of the first to think about genre in this new way, wrote a landmark essay called Genres as
Social Action, in which she created a well-known definition of genres as typified rhetorical responses
based in recurrent situations (31). Or to expand on this new way of looking at genre, Charles Bazerman,
another leading theorist, explains it this way:
Genres are not just forms. Genres are forms of life, ways of being. They are frames for
social action. They are environments for learning. They are locations within which
meaning is constructed. Genres shape the thoughts we form and the communications by
which we interact. Genres are the familiar places we go to create intelligible
communicative action with each other and the guideposts we use to explore the
unfamiliar. (19)
Understanding genre starts in understanding two related ideas: rhetoric and rhetorical situations.
Let me explain. Imagine you are telling the story of how you inadvertently smashed the tail-light of a
parked car to 1) your closest friend, 2) your parents, 3) the owner of the car, 4) the insurance agent, or 5)
people at a party. Cant you just see yourself using words differently to adjust to those who are hearing
you? Im not talking about lying, but about the collection of communicative behaviors that you employ to
position yourself in different situations. This might include word choices, the way you frame the story, the
tone you take, what you leave out, and even when you keep silent. In order to position yourself in social
communication, you have learned to use rhetoric. Rhetoric, which used to be thought of as the art of
persuasion (and is commonly associated with sleazy intentions), has been reconsidered in the last fifty
years by language scholars. Rhetoric is more appropriately seen as the communicative practices that we
all use to make meaning, which often involves words in some way or another. I think of rhetoric as using
communication (language, form, visuals, signs) in such a way as to influence listeners (or readers) to hear
your side, favor you, agree to your position, understand you, or for you to simply fit it. If you think about
it, its hardif not impossibleto not be rhetorical, at least in social situations. Youre being rhetorical
every time you talk in class, write a paper, ride a bus, tell a story, or hang out with friends. In fact,

situations such as these that call for some kind of social interaction are called rhetorical situations. A
rhetorical situation is a circumstance that requires people to act or react, and over time typical responses
have become the patterns we now call genres. In other words, certain social occasions happen over and
over again, and the way people respond to them gels into a pattern. Thats how we get genres that carry
with them accepted social sensibilities. I like the way Anis Bawarshi says it when he explains: Genres
function as habits as well as habitats for acting in language (145).
Because genre theory expands our former use of the term, some more specifics are in order.
Genres can be written texts (like resumes, English essays, lab reports), spoken patterns (like ordering in a
restaurant, phone conversations, classroom talk), or even social behaviors (like standing in line at the
grocery store or being a fan at a baseball game). Not all academics who are interested in genre theory
add this last behavioral twist to genre definitions, but I see it as a good way to look at genre as social
action. I say that genres are socially constructed shapes of meaning shared by people living, working, or
communicating in the same place. Genres enable us to grok the realities of our existence. For instance, in
the restaurant example, you talk to the host who seats you, to the waitperson who serves you, to the
cashier who takes your payment. The restaurant becomes a site where familiar cultural communication
happens in predictable ways. When I order my food, I never stand on the table and sing an aria to
communicate my menu selection (although that genre could actually accomplish the same goal). Without
thinking, I conduct table conversation with the server and my companions that sounds very much like
every other customer in the place, although I do not consciously try to imitate their language use. I have
learned to use genres as social action.
Genres are interesting because they have a dual and reciprocal nature: they are both the structured
patterns that start in our mind of what makes sense to do, and they are also what we do with those
conceptual inclinations. The mental map turns into action (the word instantiate is very useful here
because it means for an abstract idea to be made concrete), and thats why Miller calls genres social
actions. The more we perform genres, they more such a possibility seems automatic and called forand
around and around it goes.
Another double-sided characteristic is that genres both reflect the ways of knowing, ways of
being, ways of acting that shaped them in the first place, and they recreate those expectations. Because
they show us what is seemingly normal, genres replicate themselves, (re)creating the desire, the impulse,
the exigence (urgency) to act out what we know. This is a crucial element of genre, because the desire
to act in the socially formed spaces of genre is at the heart of genre as social action. Berkenkotter and
Huckin maintain that genres reveal the following four crucial elements of a groups way of thinking:
norms, epistemology, ideology, and social ontology (497). Norms are the rules and standards a group
operates by; epistemology is how someone knows what they know (such as knowing by logic or knowing

by experience); ideology is an entire system of beliefs; social ontology deals with ways of acting and
being in the world. Again, Ill refer to something Bawarshi says because it is helpful here, especially
when it come to writing; he says that genres maintain the desires they help writers fulfill and that they
do this because they organize and generate a range of desires and subject positions, practices, and
relationships to others (145 ff). It is easy to see that genres social actions exert a powerful influence when
it comes to what we hold to be right and true ways of acting in language, and even more importantly,
genres work to shape identity. How does identity get involved? Genres draw a person to act out approved
social roles, to perform according to the social rhetoric of situated communities.
My proverb is that we do genres, but genres do us because they rhetorically reflect and replicate
the ideology of specialized groups that use expected genre (and just think of how this applies to academic
genres of college writing). We may think our intentions and motivations are uniquely ours, but in truth,
they (mostly) come from somewhere outside us. That reminds us not to forget the reciprocal nature of
genres. You wont invent the ways to write in the academic situations you go into, they will come already
formed. Wherever you write, you wont just write some marks on a page. Youll write in genres. Genres
are like archeological artifacts that reveal the habits of the groups that invented them, so theyre like
magnifying glasses to analyze the past and predict the future (because people who write that way/act that
way will be disposed to think that way). The actions that genres do, do not reveal your individual
intentions, they reveal the desires, intentions, and meanings of the communities wherein youll be asked
to write. Generally speaking, the ability to write particular genres successfully comes from being
embedded in the assumptions and practices of that particular community or discipline: the whole
rhetorical community gets reproduced in the genres you write..
Lest this starts to sound so deterministic that you feel there is no room for any individual
expression, let me admit that there is give and play involved too, because some genred features are more
generic (more concretely generalized) than others. When we act out the genre patterns we know, we have
a little bit of choice as to whether we will always satisfy our cultures expectations or if we might do
things a little differently. Genres evolve and change. Every time you do a genre, you make decisions of
how to negotiate your personal intentions and accepted social rationality. If you break genre conventions
too much, theres trouble (you get a bad grade, people around you think youre weird, etc.), but knowing
which expectations are more flexible can make you successful too. Being a successful risk taker is how
innovative and creative thinking happens.
A former student in my genre class, Cade Masterson, explained genre theory in a really insightful
way.1 First, he defined genre as a recurring set of circumstances/expectations/rules/demands/ behaviours

The student name is a pseudonym and the citation is used with permission.

that we encounter in our interactions with others, that are flexible in shape yet retain certain fundamental
qualities that distinguish one genre from the next. Then he elaborated his perception of genre further:
But the important thing about having acquired an idea of genre is that it opens our eyes
to the millions of genres that we live in, that define our social interactions, whether those
interactions be face-to-face or paper-to-paper, so to speak. Being able to now see and
examine the genres we live in is like stepping out of our boxes and being able to look at
and examine all of them at once. In my own life I can think of a number of genres that I
acted in just today: the being a roommate genre (which in itself has countless subgenres), the riding the bus genre, the study hall genre, the being in lecture genre,
etc. These are the genres through which I defined myself today. And that, I think, is more
profound than it seems at first glance. Even more profound, though, is what happens
when we realize those boxes which define us, and that we can choose to keep this box
and throw out that box, or to even try to stretch a box a little bit. Now who defines who I
am? I do. Though our genres define us, we controlonce we realize they existthe
genres in which we become fully invested disciplinary actors as Berkenkotter and
Huckin say.
Cade was pointing out an important element of genrethat flexibility also goes along with genre
structure. As sociologist Anthony Giddens theorizes, there is a duality of structure going on in social
structures. At that moment of instantiation, when you turn the abstract concept into a concrete
text/verbalization/act, you have a little bit of agency. You get to resist the forms in culture at the same
time that you reproduce them. For one thing, the ideas that you communicate are partially original. When
it comes to college writing, the actual texts you produce will be something no one has ever written before.
We have a little bit of choice as to whether we will always satisfy our cultures expectations or if we
might do things a little differently. Of course, we can never stray too far from fulfilling the expected
patterns of what makes sense to do, because they make sense to us as well.
Why is it necessary to know about rhetorical genres? For one thing, understanding genres helps
us understand where our shapes of meaning come from, and perhaps equally as importantly, where other
peoples different ideas come from too. Since human growth includes learning about the nature of the
world, learning about genres and how they operate is a relevant and essential tool to learning scores of
other subjects. Because genre patterns form in our minds before we even know that they are there, in a
way, the shapes of genres shape us, and if we dont realize that, we cant really understand ourselves very
well. Another reason understanding genre is useful is centered in the fact that many genres are written,
and knowing how to read and write competently in multiple genres in the literate world we live in is an
asset. Certainly knowing genres of academic writingfrom lab reports to research papers, from

argumentation essays to response papers, from summaries to proposals, from literary interpretation to
scientific expositionhelps composition students start to demystify college writing expectations.
Although learning to write in your various undergraduate classes might make you feel like the Stranger in
a Strange Land, as the title of the sci-fi novel calls it, if you are first aware that disciplinary genres
control the rules of what makes good writing good in different places, you can begin to grok the
shapes of meaning that operate wherever you go. Of course, because genres shape those who know and
use them, we will be formed by the academic discourses we practice. Genres are not neutral containers,
but social forces that carry the cultural and political bearings that first solidified them. Disciplinary genres
exist and have the power to shape identity. In a college course like composition, where you study and
practice academic literacy, an understanding of genre as social action reveals the implications that lie
beneath the surface of writing. That understanding can help you join the communities that your education
is preparing you for, and it can help you know the stakes that participation involves.

Works Cited
Bawarshi, Anis. Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in
Composition. Logan: Utah State Press, 2003.
Bazerman, Charles. The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom. Genre and Writing: Issues,
Arguments, Alternatives. Eds. Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom. Portsmouth: Boyton/Cook, 1997.
19-26.
Berkenkotter, Carol, and Thomas N. Huckin. Rethinking Genre from a Sociocognitive Perspective.
Written Communication 10.4 (1993): 475-509.
Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1984.
Heinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land. New York: Berkley Publishing, 1961.
Masterson, Cade. open our eyes? change the world? Online posting. 30 Oct 2002. English 281 EPost
message board.
Miller, Carolyn. Genre as Social Action. Genre and the New Rhetoric. Eds. Aviva Freedman and Peter
Medway. Bristol: Taylor and Francis, 1994. 23-42.