Writing Blog Number 2

20240811 The 5 Genres Of Writing (Educational)

The 5 Genres Of Writing (Educational)

As a teacher in Australia, we were taught that there are five genres of writing. Genre is from the French meaning “type, sort, family” and this is different to the writing genres of fiction. This is the five different forms in which all things are written.

Most works of writing do fall into one of these five genres, although there are some occasions when a mixture of two (or even more) of these genres could be used in a single work. A narrative could include exposition; a persuasive could be written as a narrative. There is not rule that a work has to fit into only one of the five genres.

As such, the five different genres from an educational standpoint are listed here:


Expository
An expository text aims to present information. It describes, explains, details, etc. a reader about a topic. There is no opinion given, no agenda present, just the information. A good way to write this is to assume the reader has no prior knowledge and go from there.
         Examples include:
                   encyclopaedia entries
                   newspaper reports (not op-eds)
                   scientific journal reports
                   events calendars
                   textbooks
                   recipes
         Style of writing: formal. Uses technical terms, has exact measures, most often references as to where the information came from.


Descriptive
A descriptive text is designed to paint a word picture of what is happening in the text. It is most often used in conjunction with other text types, but is considered its own thing because of the different language used. The senses are all incorporated in descriptive writing. Descriptive texts also include texts designed to be emotional, to engender emotional responses. As such, much poetry is considered descriptive.
         Style of writing: semi-formal. Includes longer sentences and a lot of adjectives/ adverbs.


Narrative
A narrative text is a text that tells a story. This is the most common genre that people tend to write. form of writing I see. The elements that go into narrative writing are said (in an educational context) to be: character; setting; plot; language use; point of view; and theme. As a teacher, I never bothered with the last one. Using the Descriptive genre gives the work more flavour, and this is also where show vs tell comes into play.
         Examples include:
                   fiction stories
                   biographies
                   histories
                   graphic novels
                   movies
         Style of writing: formal, informal, semi-formal.


Persuasive
A persuasive text is designed to inform a reader of a topic but from a particular point of view. This is Expository writing with opinion and/or agenda included. While the facts should be correct, it is less about the facts and more about the opinion and emotion. Generally, a persuasive piece will be personal, including first and second person pronouns. The target audience is an important consideration here. Literary devices like rhetorical questions, repetition and “the rule of three” are often used.
         Examples include:
                   advertisements and promotions
                   debates
                   anything political
                   reviews (books, movies, music, etc.)
                   anything religious
         Style of writing: formal or semi-formal, depending on audience. Uses emotive language and may include selected facts, not the whole truth.


Personal
A personal text is based on correspondence, and is a text that is designed to inform a person who knows the writer. It is most often written in the first person point of view and includes very personal details.
         Examples include:
                   letters (snail mail)
                   journal entries/diary entries
                   emails
                   text messaging
                   some poetry forms
         Style of writing: informal. Uses a lot of abbreviations, assumed knowledge and very few explanations.


This is all taught in order to ensure the students are exposed to the different forms of writing. Before the use of the genres (there were 7 when I was a student, but it has been condensed), the only writing children tended to be exposed to were Expository and Narrative, and the rest were sort of ignored. This way, students are exposed to many different forms of literature from around the world and, at a local level, throughout the library.
         While the use of the term “genre” is often confusing to adult readers and fiction writers who are used to the “romance, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, western, etc.” categorisations, in the educational setting, this is where it stands.
         I was speaking online to a teacher from the USA, and discovered she is still expected to show how to diagramme sentences (which, I might add, is a thing that has not been taught at Australian schools since before the 1950s, when my mum went to school; she never did it) and had never heard of this at all. We teach it to children from age 7 (year 2/ grade 2) upwards. We have a reasonably high literacy level in this country. Just saying.
         This is not me dumping on the US education system, just pointing out something we do here that seems to help Australian students embrace all forms of writing. There are a heap of resources online (5 and 7 genres) if you are interested in looking at this further, but it is something that, as a teacher, I found got every student writing. They always found one genre at least they could relate to.