EM—Journal: 1.2 Multigenre

Issue 1.2 features writing from the First-year Writing Program--six pieces representative of some ways genre awareness can aid invention for academic writing. In these projects, writers in ENGL120 and ENGL121 have explored genre with the goal of realizing the distinctive compositional possibilities and effects available to them. Read as a collection, these texts help us understand genre as a fluid, dynamic, and shifting phenomenon. Genres are much more than rigid, tame, repeated forms or containers. Genres reflect durable qualities, but they are elastic structures whose shapes shift and bend because they must always respond to social, material, and contextual forces. The articles collected here remind us powerfully that genres ought to be regarded as contingent and evolving. In effect, they are suspended through and across emerging communication contexts in which writers and speakers interact, adapt their expressions, and even create new genres.