A genre is a typified rhetorical response to a recurring situation. Carolyn Miller argued that genres are defined not by formal features — structure, length, tone — but by the social actions they perform [@miller1984].
A term definition, a lesson, and a specification look different because they respond to different situations: “what does this mean?”, “how do I learn this?”, and “how should this system behave?” Each situation recurs, and the responses stabilize into recognizable types. Genre is the name for that stabilization.
This has practical consequences for writing. If genre is social action, then learning to write a genre means learning to recognize the situation it responds to, not just following a template. Amy Devitt extended this insight: genres simultaneously constrain and enable writers, and teaching genres requires critical genre awareness — understanding what a genre does and why — rather than template reproduction [@devitt2004]. A writer who understands why term definitions are structured as they are — opening definition, elaboration, related terms — can adapt that structure to unusual cases. A writer who only follows the template can’t.
The vault’s style guide defines conventions for several genres: term definitions, concept notes, essays, lessons, discipline pages, school pages, and index pages. These conventions describe the typical structure of each genre, but the genre itself is the action — answering the question the reader brings to the page.
Related terms
- audience — genres are shaped by their audience’s recurring needs
- discourse community — discourse communities stabilize and enforce genre conventions
- multimodal composition — digital environments raise questions about whether genres are defined by mode or by action
- essay — a genre defined by its development of an argument or exploration
- poem — a genre defined by attention to the material qualities of language