5.1: Genre Research

Genre Research

When it comes to researching genre, as with almost all of our research that we’ve covered, it comes down to understanding the situation you’re operating in and the expectations the situation places on you and the amount of freedom the situation allows you that you can make use of. The level of research needed really depends to a large extent on the amount of freedom that you have with the genre as it is designed physically. If there is a template, you’re going to be highly constrained, but if there isn’t a template you’re going to get to have a bit more power. General genre, institutional practices, and audience and use still come into play in restricted situations, but in different ways than in a truly open context.

Physical Context

Some genres have very little freedom baked into them—think about most of the forms you fill out when you visit a doctor’s office—this is done by design to get a certain type of information and to control what gets recorded and what doesn’t. Forms tend to be the types of genres that strive to be durable—the particular information recorded is there because someone somewhere has decided that it matters a great deal to them, though the value isn’t always apparent on the front end.

Forms and other limited genres are useful because they create a set of data points that can be correlated across time and participants, creating a general sense of how things are working in the broader context as well as a sense of history in individual cases. Having a record of all of your vitals for example gives your doctor a sense of how your overall health changes from month to month and year to year. In fact, these types of ongoing records are vital in catching things like high blood pressure and other diseases that come on slowly at times.

The same benefits associated with forms also come with other genres that are highly regulated like grant and proposal applications. Many times these applications are highly specific to the particular project and agency that is offering money for projects or soliciting work. The categories exist because they matter in the rubric that the organization will use to judge the participants; they also exist because they help create a uniform standard for comparing the different applicants. Image how difficult it would be to compare different grant projects if the only universal requirement was that you send in a document describing your project—it would make valid project-to-project comparison much more difficult!

In contexts where you have very little control over the physical constraints that your text will work within, you may think that your job is fairly simple—you just fill in the data and move along with your life. That can be true in some situations, but especially in competitive environments where your text will be battling others that have the same constraints, the opposite is true. If you have five sections that are each limited to 500 words then the weight of each of those sections and the weight of each of those 500 words is exaggerated far beyond the normal weight that any given selection of 500 words would ever have. They matter because there is very little room for error or for elaboration. You simply must do the very best job you can with your allotment, and ideally you’ll do a better and more persuasive job than anyone else writing under those same constraints.

In competitive cases, you need to focus intensely on the information provided about what is going on and how your text will be weighed. You need to be strategic in the deployment of every single word that you’re using. Many times researching your audience and their description of these constraints can be useful, but you also stand to gain a great deal of advantage by having a clear understanding of the general expectations of the type of genre you’re writing and an understanding of how your organization operates and uses these texts.

Because of the weighting power that forms have on what is valued and what isn’t, the contents of any given form can have an incredible amount of sway over the politics of any particular writing situation. The form tells everyone involved what officially matters. Anything that the form omits or doesn’t cover simply doesn’t matter in the world of the form and making a case that it does matter means battling uphill against the form and those behind it. This is one of the reasons, by the way, that long term residents of bureaucratic systems are valuable assets and why institutional knowledge and history matters a great deal: if you know how the system works and what it values and why, you can craft a text that will get things done. If you don’t have this knowledge, you may lack the ability to get a task done because you don’t know the particular language and presentation that a situation requires to create value within a given form and institution.

One other aspect of physical constraints in the context of forms worth covering is the interaction that forms have with the level of freedom that those working with the forms have. Like any automated system, forms remove a great deal of power from those doing the work. At times this is very much the goal behind the entire system. In these contexts the value of individuals to the system depends on the expertise needed to fill out of form or run a system. The more work the system does and the less work the individual operating the form or system does, the more replaceable any particular individual can be. As you can imagine, many organizations and companies that chase after profit and other metrics that focus on data rather than people love the idea of replaceable workers. The less value a worker has in a given situation, the less power they have to negotiate for more pay, better benefits, and better working conditions. The idea here is that the less power workers have, the less they can demand and the more profit and other metrics that can be squeezed out of a given context.

In case it isn’t evident from the rest of this text, I find this practice to be more than a little bit troubling. The true value in a given organization rests in the people that know how things work and what is needed for success. A system or form is only ever a poor substitute for those folks, but their value is often hidden to those that don’t see the daily grind of the workplace. One pillar of technical writing is advocating for such individuals, allowing their worth to be more visible and giving them more agency. At the end of the day, people deserve to be treated as people rather than data points, and from a purely functional standpoint you’ll likely have a better end experience if folks doing the work in a situation have freedom to develop and leverage expertise and are valued for that expertise. Sure you can get things done with less expertise and more automation, but the end result of that trade is you’re blindly swapping money and metrics for the well being of people and hard-earned local expertise; that seldom ends well in the long run.

Having focused on the power of forms and limited context, we also need to focus on the physical aspects of production in genre. In some situations, you’ll be working in a digital environment where everything will be accessible and readable via devices. In these contexts, color and length matter a great deal less than in a paper-based world. Knowing where the genre will be living helps you because it gives you a set of limitations in all your other research and choices. You’ll want to keep in mind that the format you’re allowed to take will limit things. For example, if you’re creating a white paper that will be printed, you’ll want to keep in mind what the length and color usage will do to costs. If you’re creating a brochure to be passed out, there are severe limits on text in a traditional tri-fold brochure that will control what is possible. Physical context is the lens that filters almost everything else.

For assessing physical context, a few quick questions can be helpful to give you some guidance in your research:

Physical Context Research

1. Is there a specific form that I must use for this document/genre?
2. Is this an electronic document or a paper-based document?
3. What are the budgetary constraints of this project if I’m printing things?
4. Is there a physical format that must be followed, such as a tri-fold brochure?

There are obviously other things that you can and should ask, but these questions form a useful starting point for any investigation into genre.

General Genre

In addition to looking at the physical constraints of a project, you need to investigate the general gist of the genre that you’re going to be writing. We’ll call this the triple-g of the situation. While the genre doesn’t tell us everything we’d ever want to know and more about a given writing situation, and it certainly won’t give us a set of concrete rules to follow, it can give us a firm understanding of the expectations that are generally out there for a certain type of text and what we need to do get our text recognized as a member of a particular genre (unless of course that isn’t our goal at all).

For example, reports tend to report things and focus on providing information that is then used to inform decision making. The goal behind any given report is not simply to report findings—you’re not just gathering data for the sake of gathering data. Instead, the report is being used as part of a decision-making process. Now, I suppose in some particularly vindictive contexts you might be generating a report for no other reason than the person responsible for your work doesn’t like you and wants to make your life miserable, but generally speaking reports should have a role to play in deliberations. You may have already made the leap here, but in case you haven’t, this then leads us to understand that with reports in particular what can matter a great deal is the types of information that will be valued in the deliberation the report is going to contribute to. Your 150 page report on the feasibility of a water garden being installed across the middle of your corporate campus will be of no value if you don’t build the report around the metrics and data that your organization’s decision makers will respect (or take the time to create metrics and explain their value if they are foreign to the organization).

Understanding things like the nature of reports and why they exist is part of understanding the general gist of a genre: it doesn’t tell you how to do something, but it often can tell you why that something is done historically. Understanding the general gist of things after getting a handle on the context can be valuable because it helps you understand the institutional practice you find yourself within. Once you get how reports work, then you realize that the particular focus in your individual context on the executive summary a little bit more—the decision makers involved apparently highly value the short gist of a project or simply can’t be bothered to read longer projects that don’t interest them after a quick skim.

One other aspect of a genre can be valuable in the general sense—the popular associations with the genre. For example, reports are usually not the sort of document that immediately quickens the pulse of your average individual. Yes, some people get quite excited about reports, but people get excited for all kinds of weird stuff. Generally speaking, reports have a rather dry and dull reputation. If you know that, you can go out of your way to counteract that in the structure and format of your text, as best allowed by other constraints. It is always good to know when you’re going into a situation with a fundamental disadvantage.

To focus your work on the general gist of genres, the following questions may be of some use:

General Genre Research

1. What is the general definition of this genre?
2. What is this genre generally used to do?
3. What associations does this genre usually have?
4. Is this genre highly regulated or does it regularly support extreme interpretations?

Once you have this information available, you have another level of clarification and context to add to your investigation of the practices in your institution and the audience for your text.

Institutional Practice

Once you’ve ironed out the physical constraints and the general gist of your genre, you need to take a long hard look at what your organization does with the genre you’re writing within and how that genre operates in the context of your workplace. Just like different types of television series can be flavored by the broadcast network that supports them, or at least carry associations with audiences (think about the types of shows you associate with say HBO and Hallmark), genre and institution are linked. When you live and work within a workplace, you have to operate with the constraints that come along with it. You can certainly make an impact on how things are done, but that isn’t usually something you have the power to do immediately without any dialogue or discussions.

For example, your organization may have an annual publication that it puts out for clients that covers major projects that have been completed this year and the benefits of those projects. It may be a weird hybrid genre, one that exists within your context as almost a take on the white paper. In the landscaping business, this might be a useful way to both celebrate the artisanship of your organization, create a sense of camaraderie between your clients, and could serve as the impetus for future work by clients that are on your list but haven’t done much work lately. Think of it as the corporate equivalent of keeping up with the Joneses.

In the context of our example, there may be constraints that come with this genre. It may always have the same color paper with the same general length and same general types of material within. If the primary purpose of the genre is to get people to come in for more work, knowing that also helps because it gives you a sense of how your institution values the work and what will be seen internally as good work (which may not be the same as what is seen externally as good work on the text).

Even in cases where the physical constraints are already decided for your organization, such as with a call for proposals that has a very specific set of requirements, there may be a historically successful or required template within your organization, a certain way of doing things. In that case, knowing how things are normally done helps you understand when and where you need to advocate for different choices and whether making certain choices is a wise use of your political capital. There is no use burning through the good will you’ve developed in an organization just to get a minor change to a document that really won’t matter.

For our purposes, the following can be some useful questions where querying your institutional practices:

Institutional Practice Research

1. What does this document normally look like and contain?
2. What is the purpose of this document for our organization?
3. Which parts of this document are highly valued internally?
4. What is the normal workflow for producing this document?
5. If there are external constraints, how are they normally addressed?

These questions can give you a great starting place in your work, allowing you to figure out the particular expression of this genre in your workplace and the way the document is put together, why it is put together that way, and the workflow behind it that you may very well need to respect (such as letting the CFO see your draft before you get it edited because they have strong feelings about the text). Again, this is one more level of clarity you can gain in viewing the process you’re going to carry out, one that helps you put the final level of research into even more specific of a context.

Audience and Use

The last level of context that we’ll cover is the intended audience and use. All the other levels of context inform our process, but the final layer of complexity comes from our use and the users of the document. This level differs from all other levels in that the user and use are often going to be without an advocate in the design process, unless the process has been explicitly designed around them from the start. Because of this one-directional workflow in many situations, your job as a technical writer is to gather as much as possible from this level that exists outside of your production process.

There are many documents out there that are visually gorgeous, make sense within a particular genre and physical context, and match up with what a given organization does, yet they fail to engage and serve their audience and assist in the tasks they’re associated with. This isn’t to say the other influences don’t matter—each and every influence on a genre matters a great deal. But, of all the constraints on a genre, the audience and use are the most likely to be successfully ignored, that is they are the most likely to cause no consequences if ignored during the production pipeline. They don’t so much create issues during production as much as they create issues after you’re already out the door with a deliverable and it’s too late to make changes.

Keeping in mind that audience and use can cause an otherwise successful document to fail, you can present alterations from this level of context from the viewpoint of a return on investment in the overall document creation process. You don’t want all of this great work going to waste because the final audience didn’t sit on the same level as the folks doing the writing and approval. As with any audience-centered process, you may run into pushback and need to scale back your goals until you can prove your point about audience/user information being valuable in the workflow of your group. But, I think you’ll find the contributions this level of context brings can’t be understated.

To research the audience and use, we’ll primarily be walking along the same path that we traced in our earlier chapter on audience, but I’ll narrow those down a bit for our discussion of genre in particular:

Audience and Use Research

1. Who will be using this document?
2. Who will be assisting the users of this document?
3. How will they be using the text?
4. How will their use differ, if at all, from the normal use of the genre?
5. How will the user’s context impact their use of the text?

Once you have this information in hand, you’ll be able to bring all of the various genre influences together into a single discussion. Keep in mind that the audience factors and use factors will be those that you may need to advocate for the most strenuously to those that are production-oriented rather than audience-oriented.

Bringing it Together

Once you’ve built out a picture of all of the influences on your genre, you can start to plan your actions accordingly. You may find it helpful to create a table with information on each level of influence, giving you a broad view of what is going on and what the various stakeholders and forces on your work may be pushing for.

One thing I want to stress is that this isn’t a process that should always come into play when you’re writing. Once you really get a genre, you will find yourself pushing through the writing process much quicker and with more surety. You’ll simply get things down and not have to worry about the specifics as much. You may eventually even get to dictate the specifics as someone with greater political power in your organization. Now, that isn’t to say you shouldn’t be critical of your work and reflect on it on, but by the very nature of how we learn to use genres and make them part of our workflows, this will be something that fades over time as you build your own expertise.

However, you will want to follow this process, or your own loose adaptation of this process, when you’re working in a new genre and a new context. Correctly performing a genre for all of those involved is a crucial step to gaining acceptance for a text. You can’t expect your report to be taken seriously if no one believes it is a report.

Section Questions

1. One way we show our understanding of genre and place is through satire—good satire demonstrates more than anything a fundamental knowledge of the nature of the subject of that satire. As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, The Simpsons first 8 or so seasons will always for me be the peak of satire of my American life. Think about genres you are very familiar with. Take a pass a satirizing that genre by doing something unexpected or silly with.
2. How does physical context change the way a genre works? Pick a genre from your institution that you normally use in one physical context and map out a plan to shift it to another genre. What happens?
3. Institutions evolve and change genres and terms the same way everyone else does. Do some research on your institution. What are some previous slogans, colors, symbols, and associations that are not longer part of the organization?
4. Sometimes a genre is misused by an audience because of a mismatch between what is needed and what is possible. What are some examples you can think of that involve misusing a genre?