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What is a genre? Generally, a "genre" means a category that is characterized by similarities in form. In writing, a genre is a category defined by style, intended audience, content, and purpose. Each genre has certain expectations.
This resource explains some of the expectations for four common genres of academic writing:
Response or Reflection
Summary
Analysis
Persuasive Argument.
These descriptions are not exhaustive, nor are these the only genres of academic writing. However, these are some of the most common expectations for these fairly common forms.
Response or Reflection:
Usually, Response or Reflection writing asks you to connect something you've read with either your own experiences or with other work you've read or that you've studied in class. The purpose is to give you a chance to develop your ideas about the course concepts in more depth. This genre of writing has been shown to improve people's ability to remember things they've read.
Remember:
Professors may have very specific expectations for what questions they want to be answered, or what style to write such papers in, so while the tips below are a place to start, check your prompt or talk with your professor for more details.
May be personal, introspective, or philosophical—a response journal, for example—or maybe more formal, directly engaging ideas and expressions in the target text.
Will nearly always use "I" unless otherwise specified.
May use a less formal register, or conversational English rather than Edited Academic English.
May use personal experience and/or observation to develop a response.
May quote from a text for the purpose of responding to the quote, rather than to analyze it or use it to prove a point about the text.
May not have a thesis or main idea, but usually has some focus more specific than the whole text under consideration.
For example: focusing on one idea or passage from the text or a response to a specific question
Uses paragraphs, topic sentences and/or closing sentences, an introduction, and a conclusion.
Assumes an audience of at least the author (writing to enhance one's own understanding), or others interested in what the author thinks, personally, about the ideas in the text.
Summary:
Summary asks you to simplify a longer text you've read, watched, or heard for someone who may not have read it (or at least not recently). Professors typically assign these to check your understanding of assigned reading, to engage you in leading discussion or presenting to the class, or as part of a longer assignment (an annotated bibliography, for example, is mainly a collection of summaries).
Remember:
Summaries capture key elements of the target text as objectively as possible.
Typically, we only see "I" or "we" if the summarized text is the author's own (for an article abstract, for example, and possibly not even then).
Rarely, if ever, quotes from the text.
Does not introduce the author's opinion about the text.
Usually, one or two paragraphs, organized within the paragraph from the context of the text/author to the text's main idea, to sub-arguments or key evidence used to develop the main idea, closing with a paraphrase of the "take-away message" from the text.
Assumes an audience of people considering reading the text, or interested in the major contributions the text makes to the larger conversation.
Typically uses Edited Academic English.*
Analysis:
In an Analysis paper, your goal is to explain how something works, how it fits into a
category, or how it expressed an idea—the goal is always explaining how.
Remember:
Professors assign the stations to encourage you to think critically about course concepts and to introduce you to scholarly experts in their field since careful analysis is the basis of how most scholars and professionals communicate about topics.
Identifies specific elements of the target text, and explains how those elements contribute to the text.
Especially how those elements might convey implicit meaning, support the explicit message, or complicate the explicit message.
Quotes from the text in order to analyze specific details of the quote and to explain how those details contribute to the text's message.
Includes author's opinion about how the details affect the text's meaning, but NOT the author's opinion of the text's meaning
Introduction paragraph sets up context for analysis, including the target text's author, title, and other relevant details(for example, socio-historical period, genre of the text, etc.).
Introduction paragraph establishes the writer's claim about the text--the understanding of how the text works that the essay's close analysis supports.
Body paragraphs open with a topic sentence establishing the point of the paragraph, usually what element of the text the paragraph analyzes and how that element contributes to the text. Topic sentences usually also transition from the previous paragraph.
Body paragraph closes with a sentence that wraps up the point of the paragraph.
Conclusion paragraphs wrap up the essay as a whole and explain what the new state of the conversation about the text is, now that the essay is part of it. (This is tough—most people struggle with conclusions.)
Typically uses Edited Academic English.*
Persuasive Arguments:
The goal of this kind of writing is to take an informed position on a topic and write about it, giving evidence and analyzing it so you can persuade your audience that your position is reasonable or favorable. This kind of writing is common to academic writing most often published in journals.
Remember:
Many of the articles you read might not seem like arguments, but by reporting the results of research, they’re often making arguments about that research and its implications. Because there are many, many formats for different types of Persuasive Arguments, from blogs to lab reports, these tips are pretty general.
Takes a position on an issue within a larger conversation, and develops an analysis of evidence to support that position (so often follows conventions of Analysis, above).
Quotes can be used to establish what others who have written on the issue have said, the terms of the conversation, and provide data to be analyzed in support of the argument.
* Edited Academic English
This is a style of English writing commonly seen in academic writing. Writers can choose to follow or break these conventions depending on their rhetorical purpose.
General Conventions:
Careful use of words: Common use, connotations, and dictionary definitions for words should all add to your overall message.
Point of view: Typically in the third person; it is unusual to see “you” or “I” statements.
Language Conventions:
Declarative, or declamatory, sentences are the most common. Sentences punctuated by “?” or “!” are unusual.
Vague or generalized language like “things” or “People think” is uncommon. Try to be very specific and use concrete examples.
Writers using this style tend not to use clichés and other figurative language.
Lack of contractions.
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