2.3 Academic Writing as a Genre
Nancy Ami; Natalie Boldt; Sara Humphreys; Jemma Llewellyn; and Erin Kelly
Let’s start big and think of academic writing as a massive or umbrella genre, under which there are lots of sub-genres. The flow-chart below gives some idea of what we mean by a massive or “umbrella” genre.
To explain by way of metaphor, if academic writing is a container ship, then all of the containers on that ship are the sub-genres. Remember at the very start of the chapter, when we discussed conventions and how genres are formed? You already know what the expectations and conventions are for lots of social situations. For example, you could easily explain whether you are expected in your culture to nod, wave, shake hands, bow, or hug when you greet someone – and you probably understand that the ways in which you greet a peer aren’t exactly the same as how you address your professor or a respected elder.
For some everyday writing situations, you might have a lot of familiarity with expectations and conventions. If you text your friends, you know that it’s appropriate to write just a few words, to abbreviate, and maybe even to use emojis. When texting, spelling doesn’t matter much since everyone understands typing on a small phone keyboard with your thumbs can lead to errors and speed matters when texting. If you text quickly and effectively, you are familiar with that genre of writing. You have internalized the formal expectations and conventions.
Why not try another experiment? Take out your phone or open a chat window and start texting a message to your best friend (you can send it or not). Now, text a parent or an employer (maybe don’t send this one?). Take a look at your texts: How are they different? How are they the same? Did you notice that you wrote differently for two different audiences? You probably did so without even realizing that you were trying to meet your reader’s expectations, which means you were writing to align your writing with certain CONVENTIONS. Aha! Now you are learning that your writing (and really any act of communication) is guided by genre conventions.
But you also know that the features of a great text (or tweet or Instagram post) aren’t exactly the same as what we expect to see in a piece of academic writing. There are some conventions that you can expect across multiple genres of academic writing produced across a range of academic disciplines – but there are also some variations worth keeping in mind.
Like we’ve said before: understanding genres of academic writing enables you to be a more effective academic writer. Becoming more familiar with academic writing genres you will very likely need to produce again and again in a variety of classes will make that work seem easier, maybe even feel more akin to how you think (as texting probably does).
But before we launch into a detailed discussion of some common features, it’s worth taking a moment to cover a few myths about the conventions of academic writing