Finding genre signals in academic writing

Abstract

Abstract1. The Challenges of Learning "Always Custom" Academic Genres Pare' (2015) calls our attention to a seemingly paradoxical quality of genres of academic writing that, when we pause to consider it, accounts for the challenge many of us feel as novice writers. Certain types of texts, at a broad level, and more importantly the opportunities to produce these certain types of texts, recur. Drawing upon rhetorical genre theory (RGT), however, Pare notes that repetition and the expectation that there will be stable textual patterns that arise from repetition is disrupted by another phenomenon: the "always custom" nature of any one instance of an academic genre. Citing Bakhtin, Pare explains that while the instances in which certain texts arise and recur may be relatively stable, the specific circumstances, not to mention the creativity of individual writers, allow and sometimes demand that each text varies from any other. First paragraph text is not indented. RGT prepares us for this "always custom" nature of genres by implying some distance between the genre -a term usually used by rhetorical genre theorists to signify the recurring social actions from which textual regularities arise -and a genre instance, or a single text that emerges from the distinctive social exigencies associated with a particular genre. But this very distance -the variability of any given instance of a genre from any other instance -poses challenges for learners and teachers, advisors and advisees. Learning to write in a new genre is more than just getting the words right. It is getting the rhetorical moves associated with the genre right. And that means the words can sometimes vary quite a lot! Pare sums up the nature of the challenge succinctly with a conjecture: "Perhaps the most important lesson of RGT is that the repeated texts we assign or investigate are merely the centre of much larger patterns of typified action" (A-91). Following Pare, we would extend the reading of Bakhtin's conception of textual conventions as being part of, and indeed constitutive of, social relations by pointing out that where there are repetitions at a textual level, these can be understood as signals shared by author and reader about the social activity -the genre -they are co-negotiating. The repeated text may include large passages or just a handful of words. But it is not the mere repetition of the words, themselves, that is significant. If we look at two texts by the same writer, we might see her substitute many words and still be recognized as producing, in both cases, a recognizable (but custom) instance of the genre.Given this range of variation, for learners, identifying the "genre signals" associated with a type of text and bringing them into alignment to produce an instance of a genre can, understandably be quite challenging. And as Diaz, et. al. (1999) have reported, as teachers, we may make things more challenging if the kinds of situations and the types of texts we solicit from students do not approach the range of variation expected in the...

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