The common understanding of the word genre to the world is a classfication of movies and TV shows but to writing scholars, the word has an entirely different meaning. To writing scholars and in writing studies, the word genre refers to documents and not a classification of movies and TV shows. In Amy Devitt’s “Generalizing about Genre: New Conception of an Old Concept” she explains how she came up with this lexis for writing scholars and that is used in writing studies. Devitt says “Formalisms in general have sustained much of the work in linguistics, rhetoric, and literature in the past, the fields out of which genre theories have developed.”
Devitt explains how the emphasis on classification can be traced back to the followers of Aristotle who had turned his intial treatment in the Poetics of the epic, tragedy, and comedy into an infinitely
modifiable classification scheme. Devitt says that the lexis of genre means had come from rhetorical situation and expanded it to encompass a semiotic situation and social context. This was a well-thoughout process to creating the lexis that would be used in the discourse community for writing scholars and those in writing studies because this was a word that no one else but writing scholars and those in writing studies could understand and use properly within their discourse community.
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