Rhetorical Genre Theory and Workplace Adaptation for Modern Professional Writers

The professional writing field is constantly changing. As technology and business develop and adapt to a changing world, the tasks and writing of professional writers must adapt as well. Professional writers no longer solely write reports or technical documentation; they can write blog posts, web content, memos, emails; they can design content and information for marketing or usability; and they can edit any form of content for the organization in which they work. Not only do the types of writing change, but the variety expected from professional writers also changes. Some professional writers specialize in one form of writing, but most are expected to reproduce many forms of communication in their everyday workplaces. It is crucial that professional writers be flexible and adaptable. However it can be challenging to be well versed in so many different forms of communication because elements from one form can overlap into another. In some situations, professional writers can even have difficulty determining what form their writing should take, and it is the job of the professional writer to discern the best possible way to communicate for the audience and situation. Scholars suggest that rhetorical genres are an effective tool for modern professional writers. In this article, I use the rhetorical genre theory to demonstrate how genres can help professional writers choose the appropriate form of communication for any given workplace-writing situation when they consider their audience, context, and purpose. I also suggest how professional writers can use rhetorical genres to add value to their workplace

Rhetorical Genre Theory and the Enactment of Faith in the Composition Classroom

In James Berlin’s Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985 he argues that “every rhetorical system is based on epistemological assumptions about the nature of reality, the nature of the knower, and the rules governing the discovery and communication of the known” (4). Beginning with the debates between Plato and the sophists and running through the history of rhetoric to the likes of Wayne Booth on one side and William Covino on the other, rhetorical theorists have always been interested in debating the nature of reality, knowledge, morality, ethics, and T/truth. How one defines the status of these, what Kenneth Burke calls “God Terms,” has a significant impact on the relationship that rhetoric has to these ideas. Over the years, composition scholars have taken up this debate as well and have discussed how this debate may influence our pedagogical practices within composition classrooms. As Christians, we believe in the objective nature of the Truth of God’s Word (II Timothy 3:16), and therefore do not need to debate that fact. However, the ways that belief influences our pedagogical practices is still in need of discussion. Therefore, in this paper, I will discuss my own composition courses and address how I attempt to integrate faith and learning through the use of rhetorical genre theory

Genre Discovery 2.0

Ten years ago, I proposed the “genre discovery approach” for teaching new legal writers how to write any legal document, even ones they had never encountered before. Using the genre discovery approach, a writer studies samples of a genre to identify the genre’s conventions so that they can write the genre. From the seed of Genre Discovery 1.0, the approach’s potential has blossomed into a robust pedagogical system: Genre Discovery 2.0. Genre Discovery 2.0 is more effective than Genre Discovery 1.0 because it more explicitly integrates metacognition into its pedagogy. Metacognition, “the concept that individuals can monitor and regulate their own cognitive processes and thereby improve the quality and effectiveness of their thinking,” is not innate—it must be taught. The legal writing professoriate has embraced metacognition to teach our students to be conscious of their learning. Some legal writing professors have contributed strategies for teaching metacognition to law students. Most current metacognitive teaching strategies include overlays atop an underlying assignment. In other words, these strategies require two steps to teach metacognition: the underlying task itself and then the separate metacognitive task that overlays the main task. This learning process is inefficient because it requires multiple steps. It is also less effective because the metacognitive activity is divorced from the underlying assignment, requiring students to make a cognitive leap from one assignment to the other. The push for metacognition in legal education has come from the upper levels of legal education reform. This article shows that metacognition is the best way to prepare our students to be practice ready. This article argues that Genre Discovery 2.0 is the ideal way to teach legal research and writing to new legal writers because it integrates metacognition into its pedagogy rather than teaching metacognition as a separate overlay. By integrating metacognition, Genre Discovery 2.0 fulfills the promise of its predecessor by giving new legal writers the skills they need to not only learn how to write in law school but to learn how they learn and how to be lifelong learners

El Uso de la Teoría del Género para Mejorar las Habilidades de Escritura en las Explicaciones

The study reported in this paper focuses on the use of genre theory as an appropriate framework for English L2 writing in the subject English Language IV of the degree in English Studies. We compared 40 explanations written by students in this course at the University of Alicante (Spain) before and after they had studied different text types following genre theory. This study will show that using the theory of genre as a framework to teach academic writing helped students to improve their level of literacy through the study of text types and specific grammatical structures that appear in these texts. Findings suggest that exposing students to good models of different text types, paying special attention to explanations, and asking them to write texts based on these models, improves students’ texts from the grammatical and the textual points of view.El estudio presentado en este artículo se centra en el uso de la teoría del género como un marco adecuado para la escritura Inglés L2 en la asignatura de Inglés IV de la licenciatura en Filología Inglesa. Se compararon 40 explicaciones escritas por los estudiantes en este curso en la Universidad de Alicante (España) antes y después de haber estudiado diferentes tipos de texto siguiendo la teoría del género. Este estudio mostrará que el uso de dicha teoría como marco para enseñar la escritura académica ayudó a los estudiantes a mejorar su nivel de alfabetización mediante el estudio de los tipos de textos y las estructuras gramaticales específicas que aparecen en ellos. Los resultados sugieren que la exposición de los estudiantes a buenos modelos de diferentes tipos textuales, con especial atención a las explicaciones, y pedirles que escriban textos en base a estos modelos, mejora la producción escrita de los estudiantes desde el punto de vista gramatical y textual

When the workplace is on campus: Learning to write for a university speech language clinic

Much of the literature on academic and workplace writing focuses on the differences between these two writing arenas, leading Dias et al. to describe writing for school and work as worlds apart. Using insights from activity system theory and rhetorical genre theory, this dissertation project investigates the possibility of middle spaces between academic and workplace writing. Set in a Communication Science and Disorders (CSD) master\u27s program, this qualitative study follows five graduate students as they learn workplace writing in a space that physically bridges academia and the workplace, an on-campus speech-language clinic. Findings indicate that the genres used in the on-campus clinic, as they are informed by both academic and workplace writing, look different from those used by licensed speech language pathologists. Some professional writing scholars might read this distance between the writing students do in this program and the writing they will do in the workplace as bad news. However, findings also indicate that there is a great deal of activity around student-clinical writing: supervisors use student writing to gauge learning, supervisors engage students with the values and ideology of the profession through student writing, and students begin to craft professional identity through writing. Student-clinical writing facilitates both the learning and the teaching process, and starts to bring the student into the culture of the profession of speech language pathology. In CSD programs, then, academic and workplace writing are not distinct worlds, but exist as a continuum, as students learn different aspects as workplace writing as they move through the academic program, on-campus internship, off campus internships, and into the workplace. These findings have pedagogical implications for other on-campus workplaces, internship programs, writing courses, and courses across the curriculum. If the transition between academic and workplace writing is imagined as a leap between two distinct worlds, then students are left to flounder in the space between those worlds. But if that transition is seen as a gradual transition, a moving through sites that can offer different opportunities for teaching and learning professional writing, then instructors can work towards making those sites more effective spaces for students to learn professional writing

Disrupting Conventions: When and Why Writers Take Up Innovation

Genre scholars have exposed the ideological nature of genres by examining how they promote and normalize certain values, epistemologies, and power relations. Recently, scholars have extended this work to uptake--the ways in which writers take up others' actions, texts, and genres. Doing so has revealed how uptakes become normalized and, thus, conventional, yet less attention has been given to how conventional uptakes can be disrupted through critical interventions. Given that composition pedagogies often seek to disrupt reading and writing practices to encourage critical awareness, a stronger understanding of when and why writers innovate or use convention is necessary and timely. This dissertation explores theoretically when and why writers innovate or follow conventions and also performs a qualitative research study that tests "a pedagogy of uptake awareness and disruption." By doing so, it theoretically contributes to uptake studies and it argues for conventionalizing alternative uptakes in the composition classroom to encourage rhetorical agency

Genre and ...

Genres are everywhere and we all know how to use them. However, they are also elusive and hard to describe. We act and interact through genre, understand through genre, and organize through genre, but we have a hard time defining individual genres, and an even harder time understanding what a genre is and what a genre does. Therefore, genre is a central concept in many areas of scholarship today and is interlinked with many other central scholarly concepts, but its core function is still a subject of debate, and its connections with other core concepts remain sorely under-examined. Genre and … explores these connections in a series of articles that each analyzes the relationship between genre and one other central scholarly concept: conversation, rhetoric, categorization, paratext, interpretation etc., with examples spanning from Sherlock Holmes and avantgardistic literature to car commercials. The authors of the present volume have a common starting point in Scandinavian Studies, but span a wide field of scholarly tradition. Thus, taken together the articles in Genre and … are representative of an expanding and intriguing professional genre network