Every Discourse community need to have genre. The term genre usually means something like a category of something however in this case, a genre is specific document that can be imagined but a generic version of said genre cannot be imagined. A good example of this is a receipt you get after buying something at a store. Every receipt looks different depending on the store but there is no such thing as a generic receipt, and you cannot picture what that looks like. Genres are necessary to Discourse communities because they are used for rhetorical situations and the genres are used to respond to recuring situations. Someone outside of the Discourse community would not know how to use the genres to solve the recuring situations. If you can find and imagine a generic version of the document than it can’t be considered a genre. In a Discourse community, the genre can change slight but not have extreme change in the discourse community as a whole. They are flexible and they change on their own throughout history. For example, a report card will probably look different now compared to what it will look like in 20 from now. Genres are necessary in creating a Discourse Community because that is what you would constantly use in different situations.
Leave a Reply