Genre Analysis
Genre analysis is a critical reading practice that you can use when you’re preparing to write a research article. A genre is a category with key conventions and characteristics. The scientific research article is one genre of writing, and it comes with specific conventions and characteristics that you can become more familiar with by analyzing the structure and style of articles in your own field.
Genre analysis is a useful way to familiarize yourself with the specific expectations for research articles in your field and to strengthen your own writing.
Genre analysis involves finding examples of writing in your field and reading closely to examine the patterns and trends that you notice. A useful starting place is finding a well-written, well-cited article in your field.
As a researcher, you’re reading all the time. However, you’re typically reading for content – not for structure and style – so you may not pay attention to the overall organization, paragraph structure, and other aspects of the articles that you’re reading. Genre analysis, in contrast, involves adopting a new type of reading practice in which you’re thinking about the organization of each section, the function of each paragraph, and the signal phrases that writers use to introduce key information and transition to new topics.
While you may start with one article, a key to genre analysis is to look at multiple examples so that you can see a variety of different styles and structures and identify what techniques and approaches you’d like to use in your own work. You can also use this reading practice to identify what aspects of an article you don’t find effective as a reader and that you want to avoid in your own work.
