Genre, Citation, and…Culture?

As an introduction to the broad world of writing and particularly, our focus, scholarly writing, my ASTU 100A class has engaged in discussions about genre and citation in the past few weeks. While this subject area might seem simplistic, I’ve been fascinated by the perspective from which we have approached the ideas of genre and citation.

Genre isn’t just the physical distinctions between different forms of a discipline, such as the difference between rap and hiphop music, but it’s the entire situation in which a genre develops that creates the differences in structure and style—the form of the writing. As Giltrow mentions, “the situation has…imprinted English” (Giltrow 4). But what takes this understanding to a more meaningful level is its implications for community. Giltrow asserts that the effect of genre is to demonstrate “signs of common ground among communities of readers and writers: shared attitudes, practices and habits, positions in the world” (Giltrow 6). This helps to define my interpretation: every genre is itself a culture, a community of individuals linked by their participation in a subject matter.

My exploration of citation takes a similar route. Our readings and discussions developed that, among other purposes, citation is crucial for an academic writer to establish his or herself in the larger community of his or her discipline. Citation allows us to demonstrate that we are part of a community—a field that, similar to genre, connects individuals by the exploration of a common discipline.

Genre and citation are tools that we use to establish our identity as writers in a specific discipline, or, as I’d like to think of it, a culture of thought. By this, I mean to describe a community that transcends generations of thinkers, each building on the ideas of those before them, and using the most ancient concepts to help define themselves as thinkers. For me, this emphasizes the value of the culture embedded within academic disciplines—their history and development. Furthermore, it points to the value of culture in general. Genre and citation define the culture of a discipline. Consequently, individuals are given an identity: a larger support system to identify with. This is the basis of culture, as a general concept: it makes order out of the confusion created by wide variety of different ideas and perspectives.

I’m explaining this in order to attempt to define the connection that I see between these studies of the English language and the ideas I’ve been studying in my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course. The focus so far has been on the importance of what my professor, Wade Davis, refers to as the ethnosphere, which can be defined as “the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination” (Davis 2). Personally, I take it to refer to all the diverse cultures in the world: more specifically, all of humankind’s different perspectives and experiences—essentially, everything that humans have ever thought. It’s a lot, but it’s all valuable. Why? As I’ve mentioned, culture provides identity. Even more, from each culture’s unique perspective on life, we are provided with so much more knowledge than what is available to us in our own communities.

What is worrisome is the amount of degradation that this plethora of cultures is facing with each passing generation. This is seen most clearly in language loss, which is estimated to decrease by 50 percent in the next few generations (Davis 3). I find that the idea of language loss also ties in with the cultures that genre and citation bring to light. The power of the English language can be seen in genre and citation—these two little elements are able to create communities of thinkers and learners. Here, I see clearly the devastation caused by language and culture loss: I can’t imagine a future without the English language.

I feel that this all comes down to the idea of global citizenship. What is our role and obligation to preserving cultures around the world?

Thanks for listening!

Kristen Lew

Works Cited

Davis, Wade. The Wayfinders. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2009. Print.

Giltrow, Janet, et al. Academic Writing: An Introduction, Third Edition. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2014. Print.

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