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Genre Analysis Activity

Understanding genre, aim and audience helps you to decide how to structure your paper, what content to include and what style to use. The genres you might be asked to read or write
vary across disciplines, so it’s important to consider which ones you need to be familiar with. One of the best ways to familiarise yourself with different genres in your field is to read widely.
Some of the main genres are listed below.
1. Identify which of the genres below are common in your discipline. What type of papers do you read? What might you be expected to write? If there are other genres you might need to
be familiar with, add them at the bottom of the page.
2. Then, note down the aim of these papers, or the purpose for writing them (to inform, persuade, investigate, recommend a course of action?)
3. Finally, consider who might read these papers. Why are they reading? What will they do with the information?

Genre Read Write Aim Audience

(Y/N) (Y/N)
Essay To present a position or argument Academic staff (tutors or lecturers)
on a topic and support this view read to evaluate your response to
Generally has an introduction, a body and a conclusion; it is presented in paragraphs; does not using evidence and reasoning. a task/an issue
usually have headings or titles; and is often written in an ‘objective’ formal style where you do
not refer to yourself in the writing. It also has a Reference List or Bibliography at the end.

Case Study
A common Business or Engineering genre. May be real life cases or fictitious, but with a real
world perspective. Often a scenario which then presents an issue that needs a solution. Need to
show understanding of the situation (the ‘case’) and provide some possible responses.

Academic Poster
A way of presenting graphic and textual information. Posters are often included in the scientific
program of a conference, and are usually displayed during a conference with times allocated for
presenters to be available to discuss their content with attendees.

Literature review
A cross‐discipline genre. May be a stand‐alone task or a section of a bigger work (eg. thesis).
Two aspects: a reporting aspect (X said this) and an evaluative or critical aspect (there are
limitations to what X says). You are expected to synthesise information – bring info together –
and compare and contrast it and offer your critique.
Lab report
A science genre. A record of an experiment – this paper shows what you did, why, how and
what you found out. It has similar headings to a Business report, but has an Abstract instead of
an Executive Summary.

Business report
A paper which analyses a facet of business – such as a situation, product, process, system or
approach – researches it then describes what was found. It is usually presented with section
headings, such as an Executive Summary, Introduction, Method, Findings, Discussion and
Conclusions. Tables and figures, stats and Appendices are also commonly found in reports.

Reflective paper
A cross‐discipline genre. May take the form of a short online post, a personal journal or an
essay‐style of paper. This is a personal style of writing, written with a focus on you – your ideas,
thoughts, feelings, reactions about something and what you have learned – so is almost always
written with an ‘I’ focus. Cannot just report on the topic, must also give your reaction to it and
learning from it. Citations may not be required, depending on what the paper is looking at.

Blog
A cross‐discipline genre. A less formal style of writing published online, you are generally
expected to write your thoughts on a topic. Citations may not be required.

Thesis
A cross‐discipline genre. A high‐level, long (generally 80K words) research paper which gives
you a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) qualification at the end. Consists of many sections, divided
into Chapters, such as the Abstract, Introduction, Method, Methodology, Results, Discussion,
Conclusions and Recommendations.

Annotated bibliography
Mostly Humanities, but can be cross‐discipline. An ‘extended’ Reference List where you need to
find a number of sources on a topic, list each source as you would in a Reference List and also
provide a short summary and evaluation of each source.