Genre Research Resources

Use the GWRJ Tags to find published pieces on genre, genre research, and genre analysis.

This ISU Writing Program overview document shares a little bit about how we define, understand, and practice genre, genre conventions, and genre research. We also link you to other resources to check out depending on what you’re interested in, what you need as a writer, or what you’re struggling with as a learner.

In this ISU Writing Program YouTube video, we look at genres as typified responses to recurring situations. We explain why genre goes beyond just a category of text and explore how genres evolve out of social contexts using the example of the hall pass.

In this ISU Writing Program YouTube video, we explore how genres facilitate activities, or sometimes make them impossible. We look at everyday activities, like checking out library books, and examine how many genres are involved in activity we do every day.

In this Writing Spaces article, Kerry Dirk connects genres to complex rhetorical situations that we often cannot separate into distinct writing tasks. Dirk emphasizes genre awareness as one way for writers to see how our texts function within specific situations and contexts.

In this YouTube video, Mary Lourdes Silva shares some ways to break down complex genres by analyzing example texts within a genre. Silva describes how to identify genre conventions, unpack contexts surrounding genres, and recognize genre limitations and constraints.

In this 1 pager from College Composition and Communication, discourse community is defined and its significance explained using disciplinary research in the field of writing studies.

In this Writing Spaces chapter, Dan Melzer explains how genres operate within discourse communities, why different discourse communities have different expectations for writing, and how to understand what qualifies as a discourse community. Melzer offers two examples of discourse communities: an acoustic guitar jam group and the academic discipline of history.

This ISU Milner Library chart describes the nuance within genres by comparing six different types of articles: scholarly journals, trade publications, general interest magazines, newspapers, popular magazines, and sensational magazines. For each type of article, the chart compares a range of elements, like purpose, language, and audience.

This ISU Milner Library interactive image shows some genre analysis of a published scholarly journal article. The interactive image identifies various components of a scholarly article, including the abstract, introduction, and references.

You can also find a plain text version of the Anatomy of a Scholarly Article on Milner Library’s website.

In this ISU Writing Program podcast, Cristina Sánchez-Martín hosts Reda Mohammed, Claudia Sanchez, and Hannah Kroonblawd to discuss genres that travel across global spaces and how they are transformed as languages, cultures, and people move across transnational contexts.

In this ISU Writing Program podcast, Cristina Sánchez-Martín hosts Su Yin Khor and Karlie Rodriguez to discuss genres that travel across global spaces and how they are transformed as languages, cultures, and people move across transnational contexts.