Inventing Metagenres: How Four College Seniors Connect Writing Across Domains

Oct 15, 2026

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Challenges the scholarly view that students rarely build meaningful connections between the genres they compose in different writing domains. Argues that imposed genre-and-domain categories obscure how students transfer prior knowledge. Based on four focus groups and interviews with ten college juniors and seniors, the study shows students invent idiosyncratic, action-oriented metageneric connections that transcend domain boundaries, benefiting students, teachers, and researchers.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages20

Reading Time31 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Findings from the 2013 CCCC Listening Tour

Domain-based limits on transfer

Transfer assumptions and question design

Genre as rhetorical mediation

Current Issue From the Editors Weblog Editorial Board Editorial Policy Submissions Archives Accessibility Search Composition Forum 31, Spring 2015 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. Introduction Findings from the 2013 CCCC Listening Tour suggest that, though college students are writing prolifically in school and beyond, they do not see their writing across contexts as related in any meaningful way.{1} In one account of the Listening Tour’s findings, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports,“students…don’t see formal academic and informal personal writing as connected. Less than 20 percent of students in the [Listening Tour] survey felt that writing on social networks and other informal contexts could help them become better writers.” In a Council Chronicle piece on the same study, Linda Adler-Kassner corroborates these findings, noting that “students see themselves ‘writing in silos, so what they do outside school is not what they do inside school’”(Collier 11) . These Listening Tour findings closely reflect the conclusions Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi reach in their crossinstitutional study on students’ use of prior genre knowledge. The authors find that students fail to tap much of their prior experiences because their genre knowledge gets trapped in the particular “domain”—“school, work, and outside of school and work”—where the student composes the genre (318) . Because students associate writing ina specific domain with that domain only, the reasoning goes, they fail to transfer potentially useful prior knowledge. The authors explain: “students might assume such a strong correspondence between particular genres and specific domains that they may not call on (or may not be aware that they are calling on) potentially useful resources that they associate with other domains”(324) . This essay challenges this premise, suggesting that writing teachers and researchers find students unable or unlikely to transfer genre knowledge across domains because the questions we ask of them often invoke these domains and therefore eclipse other possibilities. For instance, one Listening Tour question asks,“How do you compare the writing you do for ‘everyday’ purposes to the writing you do for school or work?” This question itself might signal to students a barrier between domains. Rebecca Nowacek points out that “theories of transfer” in particular “assume that an individual is moving among fundamentally different scenarios and seeking to identify some similarity”(19) . Indeed, most studies that address transfer across contexts begin with the premise that writing in academic, workplace, and community settings is different,

FAQs

What argument does the article make about students transferring genre knowledge across domains?

It argues that students can forge meaningful metageneric connections across domains, and that researchers’ and teachers’ domain-based categorization can mask or suppress students’ ability to articulate transfer.

How does the study gather evidence for metagenre connections?

The article reports findings from four focus groups and interviews with ten college juniors and seniors, who were prompted to compare writing across contexts.

What benefits does the article attribute to a student-driven metagenre-invention process?

It claims the process helps students access prior genre knowledge, re-envision writing goals, and helps teachers and researchers understand how transfer can be fostered by attending to students’ idiosyncratic metageneric connections.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by awa