| Genres: | |
| The term genre is used in music, literature, and art to define works that share certain conventions or subject matter. For instance, film critics use broad terms, such as romance, horror, or drama, but those terms often become more focused to a more narrow form of film, such as romantic comedy, sci-fi thriller, or war drama. These more narrow forms define a genre. |
Every Noise at Once is a fun site to explore musical genres. |
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Similarly, in writing--even academic writing--genres exist. They may show up in a humanities, psychology, or biology course and range from a simple descriptive essay to a comprehensive IMRAD science report. The humanities and other fields require deep forms of analysis, whether it be rhetorical analysis, cultural analysis, or statistical analysis, or even a SWOT analysis. In this assignment, you will perform an art analysis, where you will describe and analyze the content, form, and context of an image. The skills used here are transferable to many other acts of writing and communication. In fact, since so much of writing is situated--that is, the writer's message is based on rhetorical elements such as audience, context, or conventions--writing in a variety of genres gives writers practice in adapting their message to the situation.
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To learn more about genres, see