PB 1A

A genre that we all see everyday is a course textbook. While textbooks may be for different subjects, and different lengths they all follow a specific set of conventions. Yet it is not only conventions, but rhetoric too that creates the genre. While a textbook normally includes statistical evidence to support its claims, in depth examples, pictorial examples, personal anecdotes by the author or even made up stories as examples. These conventions and rhetoric are pieces of the textbook genre, but there are still textbooks which will not use all of these, or possibly any of these conventions.

One of the main points that Carrol brings up in “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps Towards Rhetorical analysis” is the exigence of whatever it is one is reading or writing. Exigence is the requirement of action to fix or make something right. In the case of the textbook the exigence is the textbook teaching one material within the subject matter of the course. To solve this exigence the textbook must take into account the audience because it is them, in fact, that are solving this exigence. In the case of a textbook the problem needing to be made right is the learning of material which is solved by further reading which brings greater understanding of the subject. To solve this issue of exigence the textbook must employ one of the three kinds of logic taught by Aristotle: ethos, pathos, and logos. It would not make sense for a textbook to use ethos, an appeal to the audience’s ego, but there still may be a textbook that employs it to solve this exigence. It would also be unreasonable to expect pathos, an appeal to the audience’s emotions, to be a major convention of textbooks simply because academic writing is normally very factually based. That is why logos, an appeal to the audience’s intellect, is a major convention of textbooks since the goal is to teach.

Some of the more important elements to pay attention to in a textbook are style and tone. Most textbooks have a very similar style; they have multiple authors, they tend to be larger than novels as well as longer, the content is split up into sections which are further divided into chapters, there is a table of contents, and an appendix. The tone of a textbook tends to be very serious and the language very academic. This is because of the audience, the writers of the book know exactly whom they are writing for. Unlike a fiction writer who can use any language they want whether it be Old English, American English, or English slang because their publication is for the general public. A textbook is written with the idea that students and professors will read it, so the language used is catered to those two groups.

It is clear that genre is a very important subject matter of writing and that to write well one must have a clear understanding of it. To understand a genre one must break it down to its core elements and discover why they are inherent to the genre. To write in a new genre one must first analyze it and understand it.