John Swales 'Definitions Of The Word Genre'

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The term, “genre’, has many definitions, simplified is the process of grouping objects/text together based on defined similarities such as subject, format, style and/or purpose. John Swales’s states that ‘genre’ covers a group of communicative events, of which the content shares a communicative purpose. The purpose can be recognized and used to identify the ‘guidelines’ of a genre, this in turn gives a framework by which the discourse content is shaped, influenced and styled. This essay will focus on comparing the definitions of ‘genre’ by Carter and Goddard (2015:233), Lynch Kennedy and Kennedy (2012:15) and Frow (2015:10). By applying a critical analysis of all three definitions, I will attempt to discuss the similarities, differences and …show more content…

To achieve in that text its purpose and structure. CG (Carter and Goddard), divide ‘genre’ into two main distinctive categories, language and literature. With language focusing on the purpose or features of the text, and literature dividing into three subsections; prose, poetry and drama. These divisions help to ‘sort’ texts into different structures for example; poetry has specific characteristics it must adhere to, to be qualified as poetry. Poetry differs for example from drama in the way it is structured, uses sound and metaphorical language. LKK (Lynch Kennedy and Kennedy), refers to the definition of ‘genre’, meaning kind, sort and style in French, as a reference point of the two ‘frames’ he categorizes genre in, social situation and purpose. Frow’s ‘guideline’ is a set of “highly organized constraints (Frow, 2015:10)”, that a text must adhere to in able to produce meaning. Text, responds to and are organized into two distinctive levels of information; social situations in which it occurs, and that of the genre mobilised by the setting and its contextual cues, “The work of genre, then, is to mediate between a social situation and the text which realizes certain features of this situation, or which responds strategically to its demands (Frow 2006:14)”. Prior knowledge, or intertextuality, is essential in identifying the guidelines of

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