Engaging Ideas. John C. Bean
genre creates strong reader expectations, which in turn place demands on a writer to fulfill those expectations. When one writes in a certain genre, one's structure, style, and approach to subject matter are influenced by previous writers who have employed that same genre. The existence of the genre invites us to generate the ideas that meet the genre's expectations. Every genre is thus an invitation. For example, the existence of the genre “grant proposal” invites us to find problems that might be solved through grant funding. The existence of the genre “op‐ed piece” or “tweet” invites us to insert our own voices into the public arena.
It often takes years to become an expert user of a genre. Teachers in the physical and social sciences, for example, appreciate how difficult it is for a novice science student to understand the difference between the “Results” and “Discussion” sections of an experimental report, particularly to see how the “Discussion” section constructs an argument (usually drawing data from the “Results” section as evidence) that tries to answer the research question presented in the “Introduction,” a question that in turn grows out of the literature review and the scientist's theoretical orientation. As rhetorician Charles Bazerman has shown (1988), the genre of the experimental report helped constitute the practices of modern science (see also Greg Myers, 1985,1986b). This empirical way of thinking about the world, embodied in the genre of the research report, is what expert insider scientists, as teachers, must pass on to their new students. Other disciplines have analogous genres that embody their discipline's ways of thinking and that students must learn in order to become disciplinary insiders. In chapter 10 on teaching undergraduate research, we suggest strategies for teaching students how to write within the main genres of a discipline. But knowledge of genres is important even in introductory courses where students need to appreciate the difference between, say, an academic argument and a personal reflection, or a news story and an op‐ed column.
We conclude this section with one final point about genres: although some genres call for closed‐form prose, others call for alternative or open forms. Let us explain.
By closed‐form prose, we mean the kind of conventional thesis‐governed, points‐first prose that is typically associated with “good writing” within academic or professional circles. Closed‐form prose typically has features such as these:
An explicit thesis statement, usually in the introduction
Clear forecasting of the structure to follow
Unified and coherent paragraphs introduced by topic sentences
Clear transitions and signposts throughout (in some cases facilitated by various levels of headings)
Coherently linked sentences aimed at maximum clarity and readability
Such structures are called “closed” because after the introduction the reader expects the writer to follow the plan announced in the introduction, with no digressions, gaps, or other organizational surprises. Because its structure and style aim for maximum clarity, the value of closed‐form prose rests on the quality of the ideas it presents. The closed‐form structure aims to make those ideas as clear and transparent as possible. The high school five‐paragraph essay is a by‐the‐numbers way of teaching closed‐form writing to beginning writers.
Readers typically expect closed‐form prose in most kinds of academic writing, particularly in conference papers, journal articles, book chapters, research proposals, and so forth. It is also the expected norm in most workplace and professional writing—memos, reports, white papers, grant proposals, policy briefs, civic arguments, and other occasions that call for transparency, clarity, and readability. Clearly success in academic and professional life depends on students' learning to produce closed‐form prose.
But there are other kinds of “good writing.” Many genres typically break the rules of closed‐form prose. These genres, which we call open form, often celebrate playfulness, digressions, personal voice, the narrative strategies of literary nonfiction, or other characteristics that resist the smoothly mapped structure, predictability, and argumentative confidence of closed‐form prose. These open‐form genres often have a reflective, personal, exploratory, or inquiring stance; they often try to heighten or deepen a problem or show its human significance, rather than offer a thesis‐governed solution.
One kind of open‐form writing is belletristic prose. Sometimes called literary or creative nonfiction, it applies literary techniques to nonfiction subjects. Such essays, which often resist easy summary, surprise the reader (pleasurably) with digressions, gaps, and purposeful structural fissures such as flashbacks or changes of scene, causing the reader to momentarily lose bearings and then reconstruct the “plot.” Some iconic examples are George Orwell's “Shooting an Elephant,” Joan Didion's “The Santa Ana,” and Amy Tan's “Mother Tongue.”
Another kind of open‐form prose is the highly theorized academic writing associated with postmodernism or critical theory. The complex, difficult, and sometimes playful prose of writers such as Hélène Cixous or Jacques Lacan seems to rebel philosophically from the logocentric structure of closed‐form prose. New students encountering these styles are often confused about how they themselves are expected to write in response to them. As a PhD candidate at the University of Copenhagen lamented: “If Lacan tried to hand this book in as a PhD project at my university, would he even pass? Am I supposed to write like Lacan, or about him, but in a very different style?” (Rienecker and Stray Jorgensen, 2003, 106). Before writing their seminar paper on Lacan, graduate students need to determine the genre in which they are expected to write.
Still other kinds of open‐form prose include the hypertext genres of digital culture. The reader/viewer's often maze‐like, branching journey through hypertext sites or through multimodal digital artifacts is very different from the reader's linear journey down the clearly marked paths of closed‐form prose.
It is important, therefore, that students appreciate where their assigned genre is situated on the continuum from closed‐form to open‐form prose. Likewise, teachers must choose what mix of genres they want to assign in their courses. These concerns—the strengths and limitations of different genres—are one of the subjects of chapter 4.
Genre Awareness and Student Learning
The previous section suggested the value of teaching students to write in different genres. In this section we hope to show how genre awareness can promote transfer of learning from one context to another. Additionally, assigning different genres can draw out the strengths of different kinds of learners and may provide cognitive benefits revealed by recent research in brain imaging.
Genre Awareness Promotes Transfer
Let's look first at the particularly puzzling problem of why students have difficulty transferring writing skills from one course to the next. A student who produces strong papers in a first‐year composition course may struggle with a political science or art history paper. Students often produce remarkably uneven writing performances from course to course, making it hard to determine whether any given student is a “good writer” or even whether the student is making progress in writing. In fact, one writing theorist, Lee Ann Carroll (2002), drawing on the psychological development theory of Urie Bronfenbrenner, argues that writing improvement should be measured not by students' ability to produce increasingly better papers on the same kind of assignment but instead by the ability to produce flawed but passable papers on increasingly diverse and complex assignments within a variety of rhetorical contexts:
The college students in my study … did not necessarily get better at some predetermined type of academic writing. Instead, they acquired a “more extended differentiated, and valid conception of the ecological environment” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 27). These successful students learned to accommodate the often unarticulated expectations of their professor readers, to imitate disciplinary discourse, and,