You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
GENRE: AN INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY, THEORY, RESEARCH, AND PEDAGOGY provides a critical overview of the rich body of scholarship that has informed a “genre turn” in Rhetoric and Composition, including a range of interdisciplinary perspectives from rhetorical theory, applied linguistics, sociology, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and literary theory.
In recent decades, genre studies has focused attention on how genres mediate social activities within workplace and academic settings. Genre and the Performance of Publics moves beyond institutional settings to explore public contexts that are less hierarchical, broadening the theory of how genres contribute to the interconnected and dynamic performances of public life. Chapters examine how genres develop within publics and how genres tend to mediate performances in public domains, setting up a discussion between public sphere scholarship and rhetorical genre studies. The volume extends the understanding of genres as not only social ways of organizing texts or mediating relationships within institutions but as dynamic performances themselves. By exploring how genres shape the formation of publics, Genre and the Performance of Publicsbrings rhetoric/composition and public sphere studies into dialogue and enhances the understanding of public genre performances in ways that contribute to research on and teaching of public discourse.
In a focused and compelling discussion, Anis Bawarshi looks to genre theory for what it can contribute to a refined understanding of invention. In describing what he calls "the genre function," he explores what is at stake for the study and teaching of writing to imagine invention as a way that writers locate themselves, via genres, within various positions and activities. He argues, in fact, that invention is a process in which writers are acted upon by genres as much as they act themselves. Such an approach naturally requires the composition scholar to re-place invention from the writer to the sites of action, the genres, in which the writer participates. This move calls for a thoroughly rhetorical view of invention, roughly in the tradition of Richard Young, Janice Lauer, and those who have followed them. Instead of mastering notions of "good" writing, Bawarshi feels that students gain more from learning how to adapt socially and rhetorically as they move from one "genred" site of action to the next.
Reconnecting Reading and Writing explores the ways in which reading can and should have a strong role in the teaching of writing in college. Reconnecting Reading and Writing draws on broad perspectives from history and international work to show how and why reading should be reunited with writing in college and high school classrooms. It presents an overview of relevant research on reading and how it can best be used to support and enhance writing instruction.
Based in current genre theory, this guide helps writers make more informed rhetorical choices and participate more effectively within academic, workplace and public contexts. This text illustrates how to use genres to assess, understand, and write within different scenes or writing situations. Discussions of writing for academic contexts cover writing analysis, argument, and research-based genres. Public and workplace writing is illustrated though discussions of other genres—letters, resumes, proposals, reports.
In Writing Genres, Amy J. Devitt examines genre from rhetorical, social, linguistic, professional, and historical perspectives and explores genre's educational uses, making this volume the most comprehensive view of genre theory today. Writing Genres does not limit itself to literary genres or to ideas of genres as formal conventions but additionally provides a theoretical definition of genre as rhetorical, dynamic, and flexible, which allows scholars to examine the role of genres in academic, professional, and social communities. Writing Genres demonstrates how genres function within their communities rhetorically and socially, how they develop out of their contexts historically, how genres relate to other types of norms and standards in language, and how genres nonetheless enable creativity. Devitt also advocates a critical genre pedagogy based on these ideas and provides a rationale for first-year writing classes grounded in teaching antecedent genres.
Technoscientific developments often have far-reaching consequences, both negative and positive, for the public. Yet, because science has the authority to decide which judgments about scientific issues are sound, public concerns are often dismissed because they are not part of the technoscientific paradigm they question. This book addresses the role of science popularization in that paradox; it explains how science writing works and argues that it can do better at promoting public discussions about science-related issues. To support these arguments, it situates science popularization in its historical and cultural context; provides a conceptual framework for analyzing popular science texts; and examines the rhetorical effects of common strategies used in popular science writing. Twenty-six years after Dorothy Nelkin's groundbreaking book, Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology, popular science writing is still not meeting its potential as a public interest genre; Communicating Popular Science explores how it can move closer to doing so.
The first full-length book to address the relationships between environment and discourse, Natural Discourse explains why and how ecocomposition has become such a critical part of composition studies. Beginning by exploring the roots of ecocomposition, including a history of the use of the term ecocomposition, the book then examines ecological aspects of composition studies, and looks at how ecocomposition is informed by ecocriticism, cultural studies, ecofeminism, environmental rhetoric, and composition studies. The authors draw on their own experiences as teachers of writing and outdoor enthusiasts to describe how ecocomposition can address issues of language and nature, public intellectualism, and pedagogy.
Ecologies of Writing Programs: Profiles of Writing Programs in Context features profiles of exemplary and innovative writing programs across varied institutions. Situated within an ecological framework, the book explores the dynamic inter-relationships as well as the complex rhetorical and material conditions that writing programs inhabit—conditions and relationships that are constantly in flux as writing program administrators negotiate constraint and innovation.