Multigenre writing is something most English teachers use every day--having a variety of assignments, perspectives, and goals for writing so that students can express themselves in many different ways.  The most formal multigenre writing program specifically and purposefully uses a variety of genres in order to study a single subject.  Informal use of multigenre is a teacher asking students to write in many different ways.  The flexibility of multigenre writing is what draws me to it; be anything from a one-time unit of study to an organizational structure to accomplish curricular and district goals and directives for the Language Arts classroom.

With his book, Blending Genre, Altering Style, Tom Romano introduced the use of multiple genres within student research projects.  Inspired by Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Tom Romano saw the value of using multigenre writing as the structure for student research.

Romano explains how the fictional book by Ondaatje inspired the idea to implement this type of writing for students: "Out of his inquiry into Billy the Kid, Ondaatje created a complex, multilayered, multivoiced blend of genres, each revealing information about his topic, each self-contained, making a point of its own, unconnected to other genres by conventional transitional devices.  I cannot emphasize enough this idea of separateness.  Each genre is a color slide, complete in itself, possessing its own satisfying composition, but also working in concert with the others to create a single literary experience" (2000, p. 4).

This web site and the resources illustrate both the research paper approach, in which students study and write in multiple genres about one topic (as introduced by author Tom Romano), and the informal use, such as having a variety of genres about multiple topics within a creative writing setting.

Students can do this!  I was skeptical at first, wondering simply, "How can it work?"  But it does.  Students are motivated by the freedom of choice, by the idea exploration  and experimentation.  The multigenre framework requires students to identify themselves as writers.  That's why it works.