The Genres of Professional/Technical Writing

If you’ve ever taken a literature course, you’ve heard the word “genre”. Essentially, it means ‘a type of something’; movies have multiple genres, for example – comedy, action, horror, animated. The same can be said for writing. In the course of your academic career, you’ve most likely encountered several different genres of writing, including academic (essays), scientific (lab reports), and creative (poetry and fiction).

Professional and technical writing is another genre with multiple sub-genres below it, including the sorts of documents we’re going to be writing in this course – emails, memos, reports, instructions, presentations, and proposals – but there are others. This textbook could be considered an example of professional writing and the syllabus for this course is a combination of academic and professional.

Each genre and sub-genre has it’s own conventions. Those are the rules and characteristics that set that particular genre apart from the others. For example, one convention of fiction writing is that it has characters who develop over the course of the story. That’s not true for poetry, which has it’s own set of conventions.

As we work through the different genres, we’ll spend time focusing on each one’s specific rules and  conventions and how you, as the writer, can make the best use of them to get your message across.