4.1 Genres and Modes

Genres and Modes

Ideas about writing, identity, and power don’t just affect school. Power is enacted all around us. Part of the work of this textbook is to illuminate the diverse ways in which language users transform meaning—not only in academic writing, but in everyday life. We started with your language, your communities, and the writing that exists all around you with the goal of making you a more informed consumer and user of language. But saying that there is no “correct way” to write doesn’t mean that anything goes. Instead, it shifts the decision about what is “correct” to a question of rhetoric—who is saying what to whom, and what do they mean to accomplish? These responses take patterned forms over time, as communities determine what they value. The patterns that emerge in the form of texts are referred to by Writing Studies theorists as genre.

Genre doesn’t just mean fiction, nonfiction, or romance, as it does in literary study; rather, it refers to the recurring social needs of a community that make discourse emerge in patterned ways–what rhetorical scholar Carolyn R. Miller calls a “typified rhetorical action based in recurring situations.” In the early days of email, for example, people needed to know who a message was coming from and what it was about. Thus, email emerged as a recognizable genre, featuring a sender and subject line at the top. They originally followed the genre of letter writing that they were based on (an existing familiar social need and response), but the social needs of email users have changed that expectation over time, and email conventions have become increasingly casual—more similar to a text message than a letter. This shows the evolving nature of genres and forms as social needs shift over time. Recognizing the patterns that show up across instances of writing makes it easier to understand and critically engage with a given text as an instance of a particular genre with expected features, and also make choices about where to break with genre conventions strategically.

Genres relate closely to modes, or modality. Modality refers to the five primary modes, or ways in which we communicate: aural, gestural, linguistic, spatial, and visual. Think of it this way: If you were composing a message on a social-media platform like Twitter or Instagram, instead of “relying only on alphabetic letters, [you would] include voice messages, images, photographs, music, emoticons, web links, and other . . . multimodal elements to make [your] points” (Ball and Loewe 311). The reference to “alphabetic letters” refers to linguistic communication modes, while the other options draw primarily on visual and aural modes. The key point here is that you would very likely use several communication modes in your post to suit your audience, purpose, and context (i.e., the rhetorical situation).

All communication is multimodal. In this textbook, we communicate with you via words on a page or screen; our modes are linguistic and visual. On the other hand, you may be listening to these words, which we would describe as an aural-linguistic mode. Most communication also includes spatial modes that communicate meaning. On the page or screen, letters are grouped together as words with spaces between them. Similarly, paragraphs are separated by line breaks, section headers, and titles to enhance communication. In face-to-face interactions or on Zoom, we would speak these words aloud but also add gestures that communicate additional information or cues; such an interaction combines aural, linguistic, and gestural modes.

Multimodality is an important skill for your genre toolbox. By choosing the mode(s) best suited to your rhetorical situation, you improve your chances of communicating persuasively and effectively. Being able to choose and mix modes makes you a more skillful communicator. In the advertisement genre, you may be familiar with television ads calling on you, the viewer, to help save abandoned or abused animals. What kind of music typically accompanies the visual and alphabetic elements of such an ad? Sad music. Would these ads work if the music were happy and upbeat? Or if there were no music at all? Remember that we have expectations about genres; we expect the music and images in such an ad to evoke emotional responses, like sadness or pity. In these ads, sound, images, and words work together to communicate a cohesive message.

Modes and media are different but related concepts. A medium is a singular material or interface through which we communicate a message or messages. Examples of media (the plural of medium) include fliers, newspapers, paintings, social media apps, Zoom, or even your course learning management system. In a sense, media are the materials that lie between the communicator and the communication. A mode, on the other hand, refers to the channels or resources through which media are sent. For example, have you ever seen words or images etched in chalk on a sidewalk? The sidewalk and the chalk serve as the medium, while the words and images communicate the creator’s message through the visual and linguistic modes. In the case of this textbook, the medium is the computer screen; the modes are visual and linguistic (and possibly aural, if you’re using a screen reader or reading aloud).

What’s it like to consider the modes of your composition? Elsewhere in this text, we discuss genres that, when considered as written compositions, employ at least two modes (visual and linguistic). Other multimodal possibilities for getting your points across include infographics, photographs, charts and diagrams, slideshows, presentations, podcasts, animations, videos, and more. You can use these multimodal genres to supplement your written, “alphacentric” essays or expand them into new compositions on their own.

“What Are Multimodal Projects” Video:

Consider Together

Let’s review. First, modes are the primary ways we communicate—aural, visual, linguistic, spatial, and gestural. Second, all communication is multimodal, combining at least two modes in order to deliver or create meaning. Third, genre is the conventional, repeated way of acting within a community (like resumes or emails, which include conventional decisions about modality and medium as well) to address common problems (exigences), connecting private goals with public needs and helping people know how to act together effectively. By understanding the rhetorical choices best suited to your audience, purpose, and situation, you can communicate persuasively and effectively.

In the next section, we return to Ashley Holmes and the public writing context that you began developing in Module 3 through your “Writing in Place” activity. We’ll be using Holmes’ work to guide our use of genre and mode when designing our own texts. Be sure to keep your example in mind as you read.