Inventing Metagenres: How Four College Seniors Connect Writing Across Domains

Heather Lindenman

Composition Forum 2015 web Open Access

Inventing Metagenres: How Four College Seniors Connect Writing Across Domains

Heather Lindenman

Abstract

In this article, I challenge the scholarly consensus that suggests students only rarely forge meaningful connections between the genres they compose in different domains of writing (Reiff and Bawashi; Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak). I argue that the genre and domain categories composition researchers have imposed through data collection and analysis account for at least some of what has been identified as students’ inability to articulate how they transfer prior knowledge. When four focus groups and ten college juniors and seniors were interviewed and prompted to compare and contrast their own writing from various contexts, they forged idiosyncratic, action-oriented metageneric connections that are not limited by domains. My data, illustrated here by close discussions of four of these students, suggests that this student-driven metagenre-invention process may have three benefits for students, teachers, and researchers: it enables students to access prior genre knowledge that they may not have otherwise considered relevant; it enables students to re-envision their goals as writers; and it offers researchers and teachers insight into ways we might foster transfer by attending to students’ idiosyncratic metageneric connections.

Journal: Composition Forum
Published: 2015
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Open Access: OA PDF Gold
Topics: genre theory qualitative research
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Inventing Metagenres: How Four College Seniors Connect Writing Across Domains

Abstract

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