"Embracing Digital Literacies: A Study of First-Year Students’ Digital Compositions"

Students’ Knowledge of Genre

Beaufort pinpoints genre knowledge as another knowledge domain activated in expert writing performances (2007). Since “good” writing always depends upon context, writers must “develop knowledge of genres whose boundaries and features the discourse community defines and stabilizes” (p. 20). Elizabeth Wardle’s (2009) description of how individuals acquire genre knowledge over time provides a helpful illustration that can be applied to student participants’ development of genre knowledge in digital writing communities:

As people work within different activity systems, they “learn to … manage genres in complex and specific ways” because they are involved in the rhetorical situations in which those genres respond. They implicitly understand that certain genre features would not be effective in response to a specific exigence because they are involved in the rhetorical situation – and if they do not understand this initially, they learn it when their genres fail to meet their needs. (p. 768)

Wardle explains how building genre knowledge is a natural process that comes from immersion in a discourse community. Students who participate in various discourse communities online, then, learn genre conventions through their immersion in writing, reading and taking part in these online environments. Beaufort (2007) describes genre knowledge as “knowing what content is required, what is not; how best to sequence the content; what specific needs … readers will have, and how common or technical a vocabulary to use” (p. 21). While all of the student participants in this study demonstrated their ability to work within different digital genres of writing, several participants were also able to identify and comment on genre conventions, particularly in regards to content. Almost all of the first-year students interviewed had an idea of the kind of content valued in various online writing situations.