"This leads to a focus on genres as socially defined strategies for doing, i.e., for achieving particular types of purposes in particular types of situations" (Coe and Freedman 43).
Key Terms
- Genre: “Genre, in this way, becomes more than a formal entity; it becomes pragmatic, fully rhetorical, a point of connection between intention and effect, an aspect of social action” (153). Genre is “a particular type of discourse classification, a classification based in rhetorical practice and consequently open rather than closed and organized around situated actions (that is, pragmatic, rather than syntactic or semantic)” (155).
- Situation: “Because human interaction is based on and guided by meaning, not by material causes, at the center of action is a process of interpretation. Before we can act, we must interpret the indeterminate material environment; we define, or ‘determine,’ a situation” (156). Additionally, situation “types are created and shared through communication [and, thereby] come to reside in language…Successful communication would require that the participants share common types; this is possible insofar as they are socially created” (157). Put simply, situations do not recur materially – the same event does not happen in the same way with the same participants – but we learn to socially recognize and name things as similar situations.
- Exigence: “Exigence must be located in the social world, neither in a private perception not in material circumstance…Exigence is a form of social knowledge – a mutual construal of objects, events, interests, and purposes that not only links them but also makes them what they are: an objectified social need…The exigence provides the rhetor with a socially reconcilable way to make his or her intentions known. It provides an occasion, and thus a form, for making public out private version of things” (157-8).
- Substance (content), Form and Context: “Substance, considered as the semantic value of discourse, constitutes the aspects of common experience that are being symbolized…For is perceived as the ways in which substance is symbolized…Form shapes the response of the reader or listener to substance by providing instruction, so to speak, about how to perceive and interpret…[Context] encompass[es] both substance and form and enabl[es] interpretation of action resulting from their fusion” (159).
- Conventions: Genre is “rule-governed (which is to say interpretable by means of conventions)…[These] rules tell us how to fuse form and substance to make meaning and…tell us how the fusion itself is to be interpreted within its context” (161).
- Ethnomethdology: “seeks to explicate the knowledge that practice creates” (155).