Twenty-One Genres and How to Write Them

Introduction

Genres, Moves, and Never Getting Stuck Again

What’s the hardest part of writing for you? Sitting restlessly in front of your computer, your head full of worry but not words? Trying to come up with a flashy opening? Knowing when it’s time to stop? Finding something new to say during the dry endless middle? This book offers you 228 writing moves— indicates go to this move number. The moves will give you ways to handle everything from coming up with ideas to polishing a final product. Using this book, you will always have options for what to do next, and you should never get stuck for long.

This book is called 21 Genres rather than 228 Moves because an easy way to find the best moves for your writing situation is to identify the form, type, or genre of writing you need to produce—an essay? a business letter? a blog? I analyze each genre to help you understand it, then suggest a series of moves to take you from start to finish of your writing project in that genre. This book covers more genres and writing moves than you’ll ever use. The point is to find the best move for your current writing situation and try to remember successful moves for the future.

If you’re not yet sure about your genre or have specific writing problems, ask yourself what you need help with—getting an idea? (chapter 23); focusing? (chapter 27); organizing? (chapter 28). If you’re just getting started on a paper, let chapters 23–31 take you through a series of writing steps, from discovering to presenting.

If the prospect of writing anything nauseates you, start with chapter 22, Solve Your Process Problems. You may be surprised at how straightforward, relatively painless, even enjoyable writing can be. And how much you’ll learn and discover from it.

Try to adopt an attitude of play when using the moves in this book and when writing in general. It’s fun to come up with a dozen openers and discuss with friends which is most effective. It’s satisfying to trim five words from a page, making it sparkle. Enjoy it … or at least don’t fear it. And don’t worry. I’ve got moves for you.

PART I

Genres

The next twenty-one chapters present, in alphabetical order, twenty-one common genres or types of writing. Each chapter starts with an example or two, briefly describes and defines the genre, then suggests a series of moves that might be helpful if you need to write in the particular genre.

A genre is a type, form, or category—for our purposes, a form of writing such as a business letter, a novel, or a resume. We use familiar genres like lab report and personal essay without thinking about what rules and conventions govern the genre. But analyzing a genre, making sense of such rules can lead to insights. Someone analyzing gripe letters, for instance, will see that most such letters state or at least hint at the kind of response that will satisfy the letter writer. There’s little point in writing a complaint if there’s no action that can alter the situation. The writer who wants an apology, a policy reconsideration, or a free box of the cookie he found to be moldy has a concrete reason for writing.

The understanding of writing genres has changed substantially in the past two decades. In the old-fashioned view, genres were static and idealized. Writers did their best to follow the form exactly. Recent genre theorists have argued that genres are in fact fluid and evolving. A writer may follow a genre model or prescription, but by creating a new, unique text, the writer also stretches the standard definition a bit, playing a role in the development and evolution of the genre.

Almost all texts mix genres. A simple two-paragraph gripe letter contains description, narration, analysis, persuasion, and summary and may use the memo format and the tone of a business report. The question is not whether you’re going to integrate different genres but how you’re going to integrate them and which one will be dominant. People pay attention to form, so even if you want to tell a story, if your audience expects a corporate prospectus format, that’s what you should give them—saving the narrative form for the letter to shareholders. Like most good writing moves, the switching and mixing of genres will eventually happen naturally, as long as you can make clear the dominant genre and don’t feel constrained to follow it exactly.

One reason to study genres is to learn to distinguish among those elements and processes common to a number of genres and those that are unique to a particular genre. The tools of any particular stage in the process—reading, researching, interviewing, and survey tools that make up most gathering moves, for instance—are similar regardless of what genre the writer intends to create. But what matters to particular audiences and in particular genres DOES change. A moment of personal revelation that might be the core of a personal essay would be irrelevant to a sociological study; the numbers that fill a business report wouldn’t matter much to a consultant’s assessment of a corporation’s culture. So while the moves you’ve practiced for other purposes will probably serve you well in your next project, the kinds of material you’re trying to discover, gather, and organize will change.

Therefore, it’s crucial to learn as much as you can about your audience and genre before you get very far into gathering materials. Read as many examples of the genre you’re aiming for as possible, with an eye on what matters in that genre. Should you be looking for quotations from famous people, conclusions of the most recent studies, statistics that seem to support your hypothesis, symbolic actions of fictional characters? Does the genre seem to value quantity (lots of references) or quality (just one or two references to important people and publications)? Does personal experience have any place in this genre?

1

Abstract

EXAMPLE: Abstract of Twenty-One Genres, Brock Dethier

Twenty-One Genres strives to be the smallest, most inexpensive all-purpose writing text on the college composition market. Author Brock Dethier, director of the composition program at Utah State University, offers descriptions of twenty-one common genres, from abstract to wiki, and suggests for each genre a series of writing moves. The book presents over two hundred such moves—thinking, writing, reading, and researching activities divided into ten chapters, from Solve Your Process Problems and Discover to Revise and Present. The book is written to be useful to the individual writer, whether or not the writer is currently in a writing class.

Questions about the example:

1. Does it show you anything new about the book or emphasize things that you didn’t realize were so important?

2. What details tip you off that the book’s author wrote the abstract?

3. Boiling hundreds of pages down into a paragraph as I did here is a specialized writing skill. Can you think of other writing situations where such a skill might be useful?

EXAMPLE: Using Geophysical Methods to Study the Shallow Subsurface of a Sensitive Alpine Environment, Niwot Ridge, Colorado Front Range, USA, Matthias Leopold,¹ David Dethier,² Jörg Völkel,¹ Thomas Raab,¹ Tyler Corsonrickert,² and Nel Caine³

This example is the first part of a much longer article. It needs to explain to other experts what’s new and interesting in the work discussed, but the authors also hope to give even non-experts a window into the work. Consider the problem these geologists face: how can they learn about the rock beneath the surface of the earth without digging holes or using other such invasive techniques?

Abstract

Shallow seismic refraction (SSR) and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) are non-invasive geophysical techniques that enhance studies of the shallow subsurface deposits which control many geomorphic and biogeochemical processes. These techniques permit measuring the thickness and material properties of these deposits in sensitive alpine area without using extensive pits and trenches that can impact current biogeospheric processes or distort them for future research. Application of GPR and SSR along 1.5 km of geophysical lines shows that layers of fine to coarse, blocky deposits of periglacial origin underlie alpine slopes in the vicinity of Niwot Ridge, Colorado Front Range. Interpretation of geophysical and drilling data shows that depth to bedrock ranges from 4 to >10 m and is not simply related to local slope. Our measurements suggest that ice lenses form seasonally beneath solifluction lobes; ice was not present in adjacent areas. Ice lenses are associated with local ponded water and saturated sediments that result from topographic focusing and low-permeability layers beneath active periglacial features. Geophysical interpretations are consistent with data derived from nearby drill cores and corroborate the utility of GPR in combination with SSR for collecting subsurface data required by different landscape models in sensitive alpine environments.

Questions about the example:

1. This abstract begins the article published in Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research. What purposes might it serve for the readers of the journal? For the authors?

2. If you were one of the authors, when else might you use the abstract? Think of situations in which you need to explain quickly what you’ve been working on.

3. If you’re not a geologist, you may find this abstract difficult reading. Yet it’s not incomprehensible to a nonspecialist. How did the authors make the technical intelligible?

To see how an abstract fits in the context of a larger work, see the second example in chapter 14: Proposal.

Questions about the Abstract

1. What are its purposes?

An abstract is a miniature version of a much longer document or oral presentation. It presents readers with the highlights of the longer document—its purposes, conclusions, and recommendations. It gives the reader an opportunity to decide, quickly, whether to read the entire text, how to file or catalog it, or who might be interested in it. For the writer, an abstract can be a demanding piece of writing, as it forces the writer to decide what’s crucial about the longer text and boil something complex down to just a few words. Writing it can help the writer focus and organize the longer text.

Abstracts are popular on the Internet, since websites like to present readers with a short version of their information to interest the reader in viewing the whole website. The little blurbs that search engines provide along with a title and a web address could be considered abstracts. See how many kinds of abstracts you can find on the Internet and how many different functions they serve.

I wrote the first abstract just for this chapter, but something similar could turn into a book jacket quotation or a blurb that the publisher sends out to distributors. Playing up the book’s strengths more would transform this into advertising.

2. Who are its audiences?

The audience for an abstract is generally the same as for the longer piece that is being summarized: readers of genres like business reports, academic journals, and conference programs. While Dissertation Abstracts International and similar publications contain nothing but abstracts, most abstracts are parts of longer pieces and are intended to give readers a good sense of what the longer piece contains. They can be a boon to researchers and casual readers alike.

Given what I said about the purposes of the first abstract, you can imagine that its audience is composition students and their teachers. Who do you think might read the second abstract?

3. What’s the typical content?

The content of the abstract mirrors the content of the longer piece, focusing on what’s new and/or significant in the piece. The abstract contains nothing that is not in the longer piece and generally reflects the organization of the longer piece. An abstract for a scientific report, for instance, will probably cover, in order, the report’s purpose, research questions, methods, findings, conclusions, and recommendations. The abstract should make sense on its own, without reference to the longer piece.

Do you think my abstract fairly represents the book? Can you see report elements in the second abstract?

An executive summary is related to an abstract but is generally more complete and longer (roughly 10 percent of the report’s length), covering the report’s purpose, scope, background, findings, conclusions, and recommendations. Findings and recommendations can be listed first, as a kind of summary within a summary, or they can follow the order of the report.

4. How long is it?

An abstract is usually a paragraph or two, generally not over 350 words.

5. How is it arranged on the page?

Usually the abstract is simply labeled Abstract, and it often precedes the rest of the paper, sometimes single-spaced or indented to set it off from the body of the paper.

6. What pronouns are used?

The writing in general follows that of the main piece; abstracts in the sciences are likely to use passive voice, avoiding pronouns altogether, while those in the humanities may occasionally use first- and third-person pronouns.

7. What’s the tone?

As objective, as neutral, as possible. The writer is not passing judgment or advocating, just clearly stating what’s in the document.

8. How does it vary?

Considering purpose is crucial. Is someone making a decision based on your abstract? If so, make sure the recommendation and a key bit of evidence appear in the abstract. Will the abstract be read by researchers trying to decide if they should read the whole article? Then make sure your abstract includes appropriate keywords. If you’re trying to catch a reader’s eyes, try to work the most startling bit of information into the abstract.

Suggested Moves for Writing an Abstract

1. Discover.

You might think that there’s nothing to discover when writing an abstract, but you’d be surprised at what you’ll find when you try to boil down an entire report into a single paragraph. You might try Outline your draft 160 to get a clear sense of what the text says and how different ideas are weighted. Or try Make ends meet 197 to see what the headings of your paper tell you is important. A different tack would be to Freewrite 72 without looking at the text—what sticks in your mind as being crucial to the paper? If the different moves lead you to different answers to that question, you may need to revise the text itself.

2. Develop.

There’s not much room for development in an abstract, but you do need to make sure that your ideas are developed enough, and specific enough, to be useful. Answer the journalist’s questions 87 to make sure you cover the basics. Try writing a single sentence about the core of the text, then use Explain your code words 93.

3. Gather.

Consider using a Double-entry journal 106 with important points on the left side and on the right how they connect to the whole. Try to make sure you’re representing the whole text. Go back through the headings or the table of contents to make sure you’re not forgetting anything significant. Skim 103. Force yourself to read intelligently 154. Look at the beginning and end of each paragraph. Use all the clues the writer gives you about what’s important—words like because and therefore that indicate cause and effect as well as any comparatives (better), superlatives (best), or keywords