Texts

"Whether material or digital, a text has an author, content, style, and an intended audience. A text communicates messages through a mode or multiple modes."

—Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia,"Glossary"

A text is anything that can be “read” or interpreted. In general, texts are made up of written words: a book, an article, a flyer or billboard, a poem or story, a tweet, graffiti on a bathroom wall. But a text can also be spoken, as in a speech or song, as well as visual, as in a piece of artwork or photograph, or even multimodal, as in a TV show, performance, or movie. If we can reasonably talk about an author or creators, if we can talk about ways to understand it, agree or disagree with it, or interpret it, then it can be considered a text. (Our course syllabus is no exception.)

• • Hot tip! The word "text" is a big, general term covering many genres, but the word "story" is not. A story is a fictional text or perhaps a memoir, but story does not cover most non-fiction texts. When in doubt, use "text" (and not "story," even if the text contains stories about people or things in it).

Genres

Experienced readers and novices alike do well to consider genre, which is the general term for any particular kind of text. For instance, drama is a distinct genre of literature, but within it we might identify additional genres, such as comedy and tragedy. Nonfiction includes biography and also history, as well as current events. Action movies comprise a genre generally distinguished from romantic comedies, but it might nonetheless include superhero movies, westerns, and Kung Fu movies, some of which might even include some romance. Genres are not fixed categories, and they are often contested.

Genre both determines and is determined by audience and, of course, by the “available means” of persuasion and the rhetorical moment or situation (kairos). An Op Ed or an open letter will take a different shape in 2019 than in 1914, but even in the same time period and same language, the readers of TIME Magazine will differ from the readers of Vanity Fair or the New Yorker or the San Francisco Chronicle or Ebony or Rolling Stone: the audiences are different, which is likely to have an impact on the form and genre.

Fiction writer Nicola Griffith determines that even within a genre like the "author bios" provided on a book jacket or before a presentation, audience, purpose, and rhetorical situation matter, as does tone: 

"It’s a question of understanding the zeitgeist feeling the vibe. This can be hard for newcomers, whether new to the profession or to a particular genre or category. A bio for the NYT is quite different to that for a small community press, or for an academic journal versus a picture book. No one tells you this."

Academic writing is its own genre with a variety of sub-genres. The course syllabus is a genre, as is a term paper or an essay. The college application essay is a genre, as well. 

Other text-based genres include TikTok commentaries, political speeches, obituaries and eulogies, online product reviews, poetry (with many sub-categories), resumes, apology notes, complaint letters, and... so many more (see "want more?" below). And genres move well beyond written texts to include music, art, and other kinds of creative and communicative expression.