Complicating Writing Instruction: Mode, Genre, & Modalities

A note about pronouns: “As the editors of the recent editions of the Chicago Manual of Style (2017), the Associated Press Stylebook (2018), and other style guides affirm, the pronoun they is appropriate to use in writing when referring to singular antecedents, including when writing for publication. Unless the gender of a singular personal antecedent is otherwise specified, use the gender-neutral singular pronouns they, them, their, and theirs. ”

NCTE, Statement on Gender and Language, October 23, 2018

After traversing middle, secondary, and college writing worlds the past few years, I have determined that I conflate and confuse writing terminology in my instruction. The way the standards or objectives are written for a writing course typically frame writing by categories (e.g., narrative, informational, and argument in grades 3 through 12; “variety of genres” in first-year college writing programs), which then leads to assignments also framed around categories. Naming, teaching, and writing by categories make for concrete, measurable ways of assigning and assessing the choices and moves writers make (or are told to make in the classroom). I have used the word “category” here and not “genre” because this is the word I have confused. Today’s post has taken me a month to write because, for me, writing is a way of making sense of things inasmuch as it is in communicating with others. What began with a question about genre evolved into a much more nuanced way of thinking about what we do in the writing classroom.

We teach English language arts, which involves teaching reading and writing (and all the other aspects of language and literature). Genre helps us put a name on what we are reading and writing — a way of talking about the text. However, what genre means in literature (biography, mystery) is not quite the same as genre in writing (lab report, college application essay). Still, what may be more concerning is that the way we talk about genre undermines our students’ holistic understanding of writers and writing, undermines the social, dynamic way that genre works. With new technologies, written language is just one way we are communicating these days. For example, what we once communicated in a friendly letter mailed across states in an envelope now happens instantaneously in an emoji, video, selfie, meme. Is this a question of genre, form, medium, and/or mode, and/or something else? How are we navigating what writing is and does in today’s writing classrooms?

Theory

There are entire university departments working from different fields to uncover genre — literature, linguistics, and rhetoric — yet such scholarly work rarely makes its way into the practice of teachers across America. Coming from Rhetoric and Composition, Amy Devitt “Generalizations about Genre” argues writing education must shift from genre as a classification to genre as a rhetorical construct (p. 573): “Treating genre as form requires dividing form from content; with genre as the form into which content is put…it makes genre a normalizing and static concept, a set of forms that constrain the individual; genuine writers distinguish themselves only by breaking out of those generic constraints” (p. 574).

Also in the Rhetoric and Composition world, Carolyn Miller’s “Genre as Social Action” describes genre as a socially recognizable way for a writer to make their intentions known (p. 157-8) and for readers to read, comprehend, ponder, respond. For example, I (mostly) read novels from beginning to end but sometimes (gasp) skip to the end to find out how/if the author resolves the conflict. This is because I know how novels work. When I was visiting my six-year-old niece, she wanted to show me a picture of a dilophosaurus. I watched as she turned to the table of contents in her dinosaur encyclopedia, scanned the page, and then turned to the dilophosaurus page. She knew and depended on the organizational structures of her informational book. Readers and writers must be able to read a variety of genres and learn to notice its form if they are to understand, holistically, how a text works. The situation for reading (a story or information) depends on a form (plot or list), which is what makes that text a specific genre (novel or encyclopedia) and thus meaningful to the reader.

Text Types or Rhetorical Modes

Instructional goals, however, are not framed by situation. Let’s look at how state instructional goals are communicated to teachers in grades 3-12. Some middle and upper English language arts teachers encounter “types” of writing according to standards. The writing “standards,” whether Common Core or other, divide writing into types. Ruth Culham explains these types of writing as modes that establish the purpose for which we write. To use Common Core terms, types include narrative (tell a story); informational (to explain and provide information); and argument (to construct an argument using logic and reasoning). Of course, writers blend modes. Writers can inform through a narrative, for example. Still, Culham suggests teachers confer with students about focusing on a dominant mode when writing.

Which comes first, the mode or the topic? Do you teach writing mode-by-mode, or does what students want to write determine the mode?

Which comes first, the mode or the topic? Do you teach writing mode-by-mode, or does what students want to write determine the mode? In other words, in your classroom, does the idea drive the writing or does the mode drive the writing? For example, if a student decides she wants to write about coding, what happens next? In a peer or teacher conference, the student may decide she wants to tell the story of how she became interested in coding, explain what coding is, argue why coding should be a class in school, or do some combination of these. Deciding on a dominant mode might help the student focus the writing or, perhaps, reveal, she has several pieces of writing to develop within the topic of coding.

After mode, the question might be what form should the writing take? Now, here, I confuse myself (and students) because sometimes I talk about form as in the text structure or how the ideas are sequenced, and sometimes I mean form as in medium such an infographic, video or a slideshow. These are questions about what the text will look like on a page or screen and how the ideas will be communicated to readers or an audience. For our student-writer to decide how to proceed, she must think about genre.

Genre

In literature conversations, we talk about genre all the time with little (or less) confusion. Fiction genres include realistic, mystery, science fiction, etc. Nonfiction genres include biography, memoir, diary, etc. Genres, in this sense, are categories of literature; however, does genre work the same way in writing instruction?

When we, as readers, recognize the genre of a text, “we make assumptions not only about the form but also about the text’s purpose, its subject matter, its writer, and its expected reader. If I open an envelope and recognize a sales letter in my hand, I understand that a company will make a pitch for its product and want me to buy it. Once I recognize that genre, I will throw the letter away or scan it for the product it is selling” (Devitt, p. 574). Genre is more than purpose (modes) and medium (paper, email), it entails the rhetorical situation and the social context. In very clear terms, Janet Giltrow in Academic Reading states: situation/context + form= genre. To put it another way, when we teach genre, we aren’t just teaching what form the communication will take, we are teaching about the situation in which the writer, message, and reader are interacting, and this is dynamic and responsive, which means our writing instruction must also be dynamic and responsive.

Janet Giltrow in Academic Reading states: situation/context + form= genre.

Genres develop because they respond to situations that writers encounter repeatedly. The features of the genre develop out of response to their situations, and as situations change over time or context, the genre shifts. But Devitt asks: “where does the ‘situation’ come from?” (p. 577): “By selecting a genre to write in, or by beginning to write within a genre, the writer has selected the situation entailed in that genre”(p. 581). The answer is in the situation. Miller states: “[I]naugurals, eulogies, courtroom speeches, and the like have conventional forms because they arise in situations with similar structures and elements and because rhetors respond in similar ways, having learned from precedent what is appropriate and what effects their actions are likely to have on other people” (p. 152). This conception of genre has great implications for writing instruction. If we want students to write in a variety of genres, then we must help students identify situations in their own lives or design situations that require our students-rhetors to discover “from precedent what is appropriate,” and this comes from studying not only mentor texts but the situations to which those texts are responding.

Within Giltrow’s genre equation, we see the word “form.” In my teaching, I have used the word “form” in place of what Culham refers to as mode (narrative, informational, argument), and I have used “form” in place of genre (eulogy, letter, speech), and I have used “form” to mean the organizational pattern of a piece while also referring to this as “text structure.” For example, which structure serves the situation best: chronological, problem-solution, cause-effect, comparison (side-by-side or point-by-point)? Still, as a writer, I can convey problem-solution, for example, through graphs and charts using text -only, or a text-photo combination; and/or verbally, in video or in person. In all instances in which I use “form,” I am referring to the way writers communicate ideas, but in doing so, I conflate so many decisions and thus opportunities for the “art” of language arts. The writer, however, must be the one making the decisions about mode, form, and text structure based on the situation and context that drives the writer’s message, and for this, we will have to think about “mode” in a whole new way: multimodal literacies.

Modes of Meaning

NCTE’s position statement on multimodal literacies calls for the integration of multiple modes of communication and expression: “the interplay of meaning-making systems (alphabetic, oral, visual, etc.) that teachers and students should strive to study and produce. ‘Multiple ways of knowing’ (Short & Harste) also include art, music, movement, and drama, which should not be considered curricular luxuries.” Thus, NCTE explains mode as something beyond purpose. Indeed, in thinking about mode as a meaning-making system, the situation, form, and text structure that define expectations of genre are now open to revision. And so the way English language arts teachers have thought about and taught writing (by mode/purpose) really has to shift toward thinking about how we can support our writers in understanding the rhetorical situation (what the writer wants, what the audience wants/expects), the tools available for communication, the organization of ideas using those tools, the distribution of the message, and the ethical implications of it all.

According to Ball and Charlton, multimodal means “multiple + modes”; however, they explain that “modes” refers to meaning-making systems which is different from the way Culham and Common Core define modes. The New London Group (1996) outlines five modes of meaning: visual (typeface, background, transitions, contrast); audio (spoken, sound, ambient noise, volume, silence); gestural (facial expression, gesture); spatial (line spacing, size of photos, white space); and linguistic (written, spoken, read, heard, word choice, delivery). Multimodal texts are works that use more than just words and letters to communicate a thought; they may include audio, video, photographs, drawings, even dance.

Of course, writing has never been mono-modal. Traci Gardner writes: “Everything in the composition classroom is multimodal composing. It’s impossible to write a text that engages only one mode. Take a traditional essay, printed out and stapled in the upper left corner. That text includes the linguistic, spatial, and visual modes of communication at a minimum.” So, in contemporary writing studies and NCTE, mode is not purpose but “communicative acts that contribute to the making of meaning” (Ball & Charlton). How often and in what ways do writing teachers teach students to think about and use meaning-making systems? I’ll admit that I haven’t been explicit about the options students really have for their compositions.

Let’s return to our coder. She will write about coding. She will write in the rhetorical mode of argument about girls who code. This purpose can be achieved in various forms: poem, business letter, speech, slideshow, unit plan, demonstration. Her audience and the context for publishing this argument matters because the audience will expect certain visual, spatial, even aural features depending on the context/situation. Thus, she must decide on what the audience and occasion need. Which combinations of communication modes will have the greatest impact? What tools or media for communicating are available, and can a particular modality disrupt expectations just enough to change hearts and minds. Indeed, all of this is genre. The student-writer is creating and shaping genre every time they combine mode, form, text structure, and modalities in response to a situation whether that is real or imagined.

It turns out that our coder had several genres in her, which, together, create a genre in and of itself. The first offers a background on how she became interested in coding, which is a rhetorical mode of narrative. Then, she shifts to informational mode. Her audience is new to her and coding, and she knows she is starting a blog series that will gradually develop a relationship with her readers. The genre and medium is a blog. The second is informational that uses a how-to text structure that engages visual and linguistic meaning-making systems with its headings, use of color. The third is an informational text using comparison structure and the infographic medium in a dominant visual meaning-making mode with images, color, and use of space. The infographic, however, is on the blog, so it does not take on the dimensional mode that it would had it been printed and taped to the classroom wall. The final piece is a spoken word text; she performed this piece in front of her classmates, so we miss the meaning that comes from gestural, aural, and spatial modes. She integrates all three rhetorical modes or text types with narrative, informational, and argument purposes. Visually, you can see her use of verse in composing this piece. The genre is spoken word in the medium of a blog, but you are seeing it in the PNG medium on my blog. All four pieces were published on the blog for her audience with the bonus of the spoken word performance, but she also used Canva for the infographic.

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Concluding Thoughts (for now)

The writing classrooms across America are changing, have been changing for decades. From chalkboards to whiteboards to Smartboards. From a desktop to computer labs to rolling-shared iPad carts to 1:1 Chromebooks. From printed textbooks to digital sources offering up-to-the-minute publications. From blue books to consumable workbooks to tools that resist linear sequencing and welcome real-time collaboration.

Of course, then, we have to think about terminology and how we talk about and teach writing has and must change. Students need to develop a capacity to navigate multiple rhetorical and communication modes, media, and situations, and that means they have to have time and space to make choices, produce, respond, and revise in a social environment. They must learn ethical practices as creators and consumers of information. Writing pedagogy, therefore, cannot be about efficiency — worksheets; Google forms that score grammar quizzes; programs that score essays; feedback banks; rubrics that measure excellent vs. good.

What is “good writing” or a “good writer” is no longer (nor ever has been) a static standard. There are too many variables: the individual writer, situation, context, genre. The writing classroom has to be about the lives our students live and want to live beyond the classroom with their languages, discourses, and technologies. The New London Group talks about pedagogy as such:”…if one of our pedagogical goals is a degree of mastery in practice, then immersion in a community of learners engaged in authentic versions of such practice is necessary” (p. 84). Still, their work emphasizes that mastery is not sufficient without “critical understanding” or conscious awareness and control over what is being learned. At all times, the writing classroom must be attending to these questions: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How are we doing it? And what are the implications? To conduct writing conversations with colleagues and students within and across these questions, we must use the language of our practice to shape our discourse (Gee, 1989), which must be as responsive as our craft.

I welcome additional clarification and nuance to these terms and suggested readings to help me continue to navigate what and how we teach writers, please comment.

Sarah’s Working Writing Glossary

• mode (rhetorical): purposes for writing (narrative, expository, argument/persuasion, mixed); Common Core names these “types”
• mode of meaning: meaning-making systems or how people create meaning (New London Group, 1996); visual meaning concerns still and moving images with color, page layout, shot framing, angels, camera movement, subject movement; linguistic meaning is spoken and written language in word choice, discourse(s) norms, syntax, mechanics (p. 80); aural meaning is sound and silence with volume, pitch, rhythm (music, sound effects); spatial meaning concerns environmental and architectural spaces and use of proximity, direction, position of objects in space; gestural meaning invokes movement of body, facial expression, demeanor, body language, speed, stillness, position, nonverbal
• multimodality: a combination or integration of various communication modes (e.g., the interface of visual images alongside the written word; a Netflix show has unique gestural, aural, and visual meanings that the script for the show does not)
• medium/media: tools and sources used to create multimodal messages or the “container” (podcast/aural; linguistic/print; film/visual and with bodies moving spatial; photographs/visual)
• multimedia: mixing of tools or “containers” (e.g., blog post with embedded YouTube video and infographic; conference presentation uploaded on Slideshare)
• context/situation: who, what, where, when, why
• genre: a responsive, dynamic site of communication where mode, situation, form, text structure, medium, and modality meet convention; “forms of text or textual organization that arise out of particular social configurations or the particular relationships of the participants in an interaction; they reflect the purposes of the participants in a specific interaction” (New London Group, p. 75)
• form: how communication appears on the page or screen (visual and spatial modalities); its physical blocks of information: paragraphs, stanzas, lists, tables, images, sound, video (visual, audio, aural and gestural modalities)
• text structure/sequencing: chronological, analepsis and prolepsis, compare/contrast, problem-solution, cause-effect, non-linear

Resources

Culham, R. (2016). Modes, Genres, and Formats, Oh My! Reading Teacher, 69(5), 553–557. https://doi-org.argo.library.okstate.edu/10.1002/trtr.1445

Fitzpatrick, K. (2011). the Digital Future of Authorship : Rethinking Originality. Culture Machine, 12, 1–26.

Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal Discourse. The modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold. Manovich, Lev. (2001). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Lauer, C. (2009). Contending with terms: “Multimodal” and “Multimedia” in the Academic and Public Spheres. Computers and Composition, 26(4), 225–239. http://doi.org/doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2009.09.001

The New London Group. (1996). A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92.

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