Problems with Teaching Genre
Variation across texts
- Different writers will use different structures
use different styles and content
have different audience expectations
Variation across different fields / disciplines
- Has lead some researchers to used the term ‘sub-genres’
Variation over time
- Writing structure, styles, tense etc. vary over time “genres change, evolve and die” (Miller, 1994: 36)
Classificatory Power of Genre
- No two texts will show identical features (How can we label a text as an example of a genre??)
- Often ‘TEXT TYPE’ and ‘GENRE’ are interchangeable.