What are genres?
We most often associate the term genre with movies (slasher flick, sci-fi, romance) or music (hip hop, garage punk) and sometimes also with well-established or historic forms of writing (detective novel, travel narrative, epic poem). Usually the label has an artistic air to it, that is, we see a piece of art as belonging to a larger family of works that it has certain things in common with. The artist has normally created it as part of a certain tradition, or perhaps as a reaction against established traditions that he feels are outmoded and constraining.
While it’s cool to say that an artist is “crossing borders” and “mixing genres” with his work, we depend on genres and their stability - that one western must be alike all other westerns in some way - to know beforehand whether or not something is interesting to us. Genres are useful because they allow us to judge a book by its cover, to make assumptions about an album or movie without having listened to or watched it. Genres evoke the tradition they belong to, giving us a mixture of expected vs. new things. They come into existence, mature, die and are sometimes reanimated (think 80s fashion) and our ability to recognize and reproduce them is pretty spectacular in its accuracy.
Traditionally, genre is a term used in art, but when you think about it the concept works just as well in other areas. In writing, it is possible to evoke a certain “frame” - a situation or setting - with just a few words.
Once upon a time
I hereby declare you
Dear Bob
Smith Faces Resistance, Protests
The court sentences you
Think about how none of these examples actually say what context they are taken from, yet you can probably tell right away in what kind of situation they might be used. Imagine a legal opinion written in the style of a fairy tale or that of a personal letter. Most people would not find such a text credible, purely because it doesn’t meet the expectations they have of the genre of law texts. Legal writing is an good example for another reason. As one famous rhetorician observed: “genres are how we get things done, when we use language to achieve them”. Certain genres aren’t primarily used as a form of artistic expression, but govern how we interact with each other (law), explain the world to us empirically (science) or spiritually (religion), or serve to inform or express opinions (journalism, politics).
Corporate blogs are an interesting case because the people who write them haven’t yet agreed on a set of rules for how they should be written and what they should be about. And who knows, perhaps they never will. If you see blogs not as some ephemeral concept but simply as a piece of technology, there really is no reason why they should. In that view, blogs are to writing now what paper was to writing in the last century. The idea that blogs, wikis and “normal” websites are different things is clearly the result of technical constraints that will eventually be overcome. What’s interesting is that the ancestor of corporate blogs seems to be the “traditional”, personal blog more than, say, the press release or the mission statement. A high degree of personal involvement seems characteristic of blogs no matter who writes them, and since many corporate genres are “de-individualized”, with the author assuming the “neutral” voice of the company, they aren’t suitable models for blogging.
Whether or not we’ll ever have something like once upon a time in blogs - a dead giveaway that we’re dealing with a specific genre - remains to be seen. The many blogs, books and other sources of advice out there on how to “get blogging right” aptly demonstrate how much we would like to know the rules.
