Understanding genre. New research article

My newest article on genre research is out now and available for download. The article tries to reach a new audience through a fairly new Chinese university journal: Journal of Zhejiang International Studies University. So it is adorned with Chinese which I cannot read at all, but adore intensely with my dull Westerner's eyes. Also, it contains what may be the anecdote of a lifetime for me. Read it and weep.

The abstract for the article reads like this:

The article serves as an introduction to the state-of-the-art in contemporary genre research. It aims to mediate between genre research and scholars working in with genre in other disciplines by laying out six basic tenets of genre research. The article thus describes 1) how genres are almost omnipresent in culture, 2) how they unite regulation and innovation; 3) how they combine to form larger patterns including other genres; 4) how genres are connected in time; 5) how interpretation through genre is tacit and rarely understood as generic interpretation; and finally 6) how our perception of genres tends to naturalize them, thus leading to the question whether teaching genre is a conservative measure whereby the teacher, knowingly or unknowingly, naturalizes existing ideologies and power structures to the students. Drawing on these insights, the second, and shorter, part of the article, exemplifies the role of genre in a concrete social exchange between the author and the West Copenhagen Police. It shows how the participants in the exchange draw on extensive genre competencies without having to reflect upon them. The article closes by presenting some of the consequential and wide-reaching perspectives involved in genre research.

I hope, you will enjoy reading the article. I worked a lot with it. It should be a fairly smooth read. Anyway, you can download it here and see for yourself.

Eminent women in genre research

For a pastor's wife such as myself, one of the great and enduring advantages of working in genre research is the pervasive influence of a number of excellent female scholars. Indeed, genre research is to a very large extent defined by this powerful line-up of eminent women. I have a deep admiration for scholars such as Carolyn Miller, Amy Devitt, Anne Freadman, Ashley Rose Melenbacher, Mary Jo Reiff, Catherine Schryer, Janet Gilthrow, Carol Berkenkotter, and many many more.

The term "defined" in the above paragraph marks the role of these researchers precisely. In my first draft of this blog post I wrote that the field was "dominated" by them, but on reflection it struck me that the field was, in fact anything but dominated; it was indeed defined. The framework of existing genre research depends on the work of these researchers. It is unthinkable without them. The rest of us live and breathe in their intellectual world. Are men involved in this framework? Yes of course. Names? Sure: Swales, Bazerman, Paré, Bhatia, Medway, Bawarshi, Perkins, Smart. But that doesn't in the very least diminish the defining power of the work of the excellent scholars mentioned earlier. Also, it is worth noting that the defining power of excellent researchers is the gift that keeps on giving. If I have ever made, or will ever make, an actual contribution to genre research it will be because these scholars taught me and defined my thinking.

A few links to earlier posts on this blog to show how this is basically what I live and breathe as a genre researcher. Here first my acknowledgment (or if you will: hagiography) of the best genre blogger around. Unsurprisingly, that person is a woman, Amy Devitt. Then, my reflections on high impact studies. The text? Carolyn Miller's "Genre as Social Action" (1984). If you know the first thing about genre research you will know that there are no actual competitors for the position of "most influential genre study". The crown belongs to Miller. Final exhibit is a suggested reading list in "Rhetorical genre studies for literary PhDs". A selection of eigth excellent texts. Five are written by women.

So, is this me being a feminist? Nope. I aspire to be one (my blog-bio says that I am " Recovering mansplainer, wannabe feminist"), but that is besides the point. This is me being a genre researcher. And as a genre researcher I depend upon the work of women. The three studies I quote the most is one written by Carolyn Miller and two written by Anne Freadman. The researcher I quote the broadest is Amy Devitt. Because I work in a research field that is defined by these researchers. And lucky me—because their work opens up so many perspectives for me to pursue, and so many insights for me to enjoy.

This blog post was originally written as a twitter thread to mark the International Women's Day, 2018. The thread can be found here.

Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Genre Studies

Two of my scholarly heroes, Amy Devitt and Carolyn Miller have joined forces and edited a volume of core texts from the dominant movement in genre research called Rhetorical Genre Studies; with a few small excursions to other, but strongly related, approaches to genre.

The book, Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Genre Studies has been given the following presentation on the publisher's homepage:

Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Genre Studies gathers major works that have contributed to the recent rhetorical reconceptualization of genre. A lively and complex field developed over the past 30 years, rhetorical genre studies is central to many current research and teaching agendas. This collection, which is organized both thematically and chronologically, explores genre research across a range of disciplinary interests, but with a specific focus on rhetoric and composition. With introductions by the co-editors to frame and extend each section, this volume helps readers understand and contextualize both the foundations of the field and the central themes and insights that have emerged. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars working on topics related to composition, rhetoric, professional and technical writing, and applied linguistics.

The choice of texts is also present on the homepage. Here is the table of content as rendered on the publisher's homepage:

Acknowledgements

Introduction

 Section 1 Foundations

Aristotle, On Genre (On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, Book I, Ch. 3)

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, "Form and Genre in Rhetorical Criticism: An Introduction" (1978)

Carolyn R. Miller, "Genre as Social Action" (1984)

M. M. Bakhtin, "The Problem of Speech Genres" (1986)

John M. Swales, "A Working Definition of Genre" (1990)

Amy J. Devitt, "Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept" (1993)

Section 2 Systems and Interactions

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, "Antecedent Genre as Rhetorical Constraint" (1975)

Charles Bazerman, "Systems of Genres and the Enactment of Social Intentions" (1994)

Anne Freadman, "Uptake" (2002)

Section 3 Culture, Ideology, Critique

Catherine F. Schryer, "Genre Time/Space: Chronotopic Strategies in the Experimental Article" (1999)

Anis S. Bawarshi, "The Genre Function" (2000)

Anthony Paré, "Genre and Identity: Individuals, Institutions, and Ideology" (2002)

Section 4 Teaching

Aviva Freedman, "Show and Tell? The Role of Explicit Teaching in the Learning of New Genres" (1993)

Sunny Hyon, "Genre in Three Traditions: Implications for ESL" (1996)

Elizabeth Wardle, "’Mutt Genres’ and the Goal of FYC: Can We Help Students Write the Genres of the University?" (2009)

Index

The ambition  expressed in the description is completely to the point, and the selection of texts is a full roster of neo-classics—except, of course, Aristotle whose is merely a classic without any "neo" added. 

The only text here I don´t know beforehand is the very last one, but looking it up I find that it has a full  256 citations on Google Scholar which is fairly impressive, so I shall make myself acquainted with it at once. 

I notice in passing that the anthology has a four-item overlap with my list of RGS-studies for literary PhD students (Bakhtin, Miller, Freadman, Paré), and that no author present on my list is absent from Miller & Devitt's anthology. Obviously, I like the book for that. Personally, I would have switched Devitt's text for her 1991 article on the genre use of tax accountants because it corresponds so well with the 1994 text by Bazerman. But that's probably a personal preference, and the choice here is perfectly viable. Anyway, to each her own.

I don´t need to read the book to know that the choice of texts, the weight of the editors, and the scope of the volume makes this a well-nigh ideal reader of classic core texts in genre research. That it leaves off at 2009 is perfectly understandable. 

Of course, if you want to be completely up to speed in genre research you have to add later texts. But this is not the ambition of the present volume. And even if that had been the ambition it would be well-nigh impossible to pick the core text with so little distance in time and you would get an overlap with several of the important volumes of genre research that have been published since 2009. So, the cut-off is prudent.

In conclusion: if you want to know about genre research this is the book to buy. Incidentally, every text is itself a pleasure to read, so Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Genre Studies won´t even scare the academic bejesus out of you, just make you very much smarter very fast. Do not handle with caution. Dive in. Enjoy!

(Hey, reading this hagiography you'd think somebody paid me to write this. If only they would. But nobody paid me anything. The book is just going to be that good.)

Genres, a tentative definition

Genres are flexible and versatile cultural categories structuring human understanding and communication. On the one hand, they are strongly regulative, but on the other hand, they allow considerable freedom on the part of both the utterer and the recipient. Genres combine to form larger patterns through social and organizational structuring into genre sets, systems, hierarchies, and chains, and through creative uptakes on the part of individual genre users. 

Genre labels and fake news

In a previous post I wrote about the genre "real news" as opposed to "news" on the assumption that the genre label "real news" wasn't well-established, but that the rhetorical move performed while invoking it was very strong indeed.

In the present post, I address a genre label that has risen to prominence in recent years: fake news. 

A crucial, sometimes efficient, sometimes highly problematic, feature of genre is that genres tend to naturalize themselves. They become habitual, invisible even. We can do a lot of thinking and a lot of acting with genre with knowing it. "Fake news" is such a chameleon.

Today, the genre label "fake news" is everywhere in debate. It's well-nigh impossible to log on to social media without encountering it, and the phenomenon it covers seems to be responsible for major societal challenges. However, this is a very recent development, and if you go back just a few years not only did few people know what "fake news" meant, those that did, knew that it meant something else. It meant news satire. Thus, this book which is on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. Notice the subtitle.

This one about The Onion and Philosophy is also quite confident in its usage of the "fake news" label to mean "news satire". Again, notice the subtitle.¨

I know all of this, because I research news satire and used to say that I worked with "fake news". Way back then, in 2015 and early 2016, I drew well-nigh no public attention at all with the term and had to explain it wherever I went.

However, at some point during 2016 all of this changed. "Fake news" was suddenly on everybody's lips. It wasn´t even early in the year, more like mid-late 2016, when the US presidential election heated up. But the genre label had a new meaning (or rather two new meanings, I'll get back to that); and the older meaning was well-nigh forgotten. If you say "fake news" today you definitely don´t make people expect to hear about news satire. This demonstrates two interesting features about genre labels.

• They can can change their meaning; they can even rise to prominence without retaining their original meaning. 
• When a cultural phenomenon rises to prominence it is going to need a genre label.

Along the way, the meaning of the word "fake" in the genre label itself changed. An old beloved dictionary of mine defines the word "fake" in this way:

To do up, to cover up defects and faults so at to give a presentable appearance to, to doctor; to contrive, to fabricate, to make up from defective material; to cheat, to fraud, to deceive. n. A thing thus prepared for deception, esp. a manufactured antique <...> a swindle, a dodge.

In this sense, in its original meaning, "news satire", the meaning of the word was ironic. The news satire services themselves pointed to the fradulent character of their news reporting. Thus UNnews, a service of the Wikipedia parody Uncylopedia describes itself like this:

UnNews is a service of Uncyclopedia that spreads misinformation and cons the public into swallowing it hook-line-and-sinker (and worm), by guilefully making it resemble authentic news articles. UnNews stories use satire to ensure the most unfair and biased reporting possible.

So, the cheating is clearly labelled, and there is no actual disinformation taking place, though there is a lot of pretend disinformation. (Isn´t it lovely btw?)

In the new usage, however, the "fake" in the term clearly refers to a fraudulent intention in the supposed news reporting. It is a purposeful swindle, a dodge. Like a manufactured antique, it is there to make you buy something that you would do better to avoid. The sudden rise to prominence of a genre label clearly points to the fact that something had become exigent in the public sphere: the information value and trustworthiness of what appeared to be news reporting. Disinformation in presumed news reporting had become critical.

As recent developments in the Cambridge Analytica- scandal have again demonstrated, it is no coincidence that this happend alongside the Brexit-vote and the US presidential election. Fake news has been a key term to understand both. And it has been pertinent ever since. However, no sooner had the term risen to prominence, before it acquired two different meanings. Related, but quite obviously opposed.

One was the disinformation posing as news spread by the likes of Breitbart, InfoWars and similar - sometimes even more obscure - "news" services, but also frequently presented by supposed serious media institutions. Here, false stories were fabricated to achieve a social impact - in particular through repostings on social media. It's worth noticing that these stories are closer to bullshit in the Frankfurtian sense than to lying. It does not matter if the untruths get exposed; in fact claiming that the pope or this or that actor supports Trump's election is bound to be found out. However, the revelation lags behind the fabricated story which spreads like wildfire across SoMe and reaches far more people than the, less dramatic, correction. So, the swindle-stories are written for effect; not to hide the truth per se, but to spread a certain kind of disinformation. In this case, therefore, the "fake news" genre label is used to warn against a certain kind of disinformation. And as such it has been fairly effective.

However, at the same time, or following it closely. another meaning arose. It was used by the very disinformers themselves to attack not fabricated news stories, but the channels that reported the actual news. If, for example, a news story is inconvenient to the sitting US president, it is labelled "fake news"; no matter how well documented it is. Rhetorically speaking, it's a lame-ass bully defense and can be torn apart easily in rational discourse, but again it is strangely effective. Again, it doesn´t matter if the lie is disingenuous and exposed as long as the disinformation works; as long as you can get the MAGA-crowd to shout "fake news", you can de-legitimize the actual news reporting and legitimize your own actions without having to answer for them.

So, the genre label "fake news" has moved from a fairly harmless, if somewhat confusing label for news satire to a critical cultural battleground in the fight to retain Western democracy as we know it. If you can define what news stories belong to the genre, if you can label them, you can win the rhetorical battle over what information gets to count in the public sphere and thus further the public acceptance of your political agenda. Be it democratic or despotic.

For further reading, this rather good academic article disambiguates the different usages nicely.

The blog post was originally written as a Twitter thread to celebrate my 5000th follower. The thread can be seen here.

Update April 16th: I forgot to mention that most of what I know about genre labels I have learnt from my former PhD student Jacob Ølgaard Nyboe. Some of Jacob's fine work with genre labels and genre signatures can be found in his brilliant article "The Game of the Name" here.

Genres and media landscapes in virtual-physical learning spaces. Moving frontlines?

International conference of the CCD network, School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University, 12-14 September 2018

The international conference Genres and media landscapes in virtual-physical learning spaces. Moving frontlines?, GeM 2018, aims to create a multi-disciplinary platform for dialoguing on the every-day uses of modality rich, parallel, linked, and hybrid, communicative genres that are embedded in media landscapes and circulate in learning spaces inside and outside institutional settings. The digitized era and the global world of mobility and migration have brought about a shift for human-beings in general and the research enterprise more specifically, thus, making it necessary to (re)consider conditions for communication or languaging as well as for learning and identity production. Today, analogue and digital dimensions are seen as being blurred and interdependent, just as accumulation, density and change, are fundamental features of media landscapes. Genres for representation and communication are created, renewed, transformed and fluid in these flexible and expanding environments 

More information and full CfP here.

Oh, and I am there as a featured speaker and so are a plethora of other highly fascinating researchers. 

News and Real News

We all know what "news" is, or at least we think we do; and over the last few years we have come to learn more about "fake news" (see my blogpost on the genre label "Fake News" here) than most of us ever cared to. But another genre term lingers in the background. In discussions of news, we repeatedly hear ourselves or fellow debaters say sentences like, "but the real news is that..."

So, if we take this distinction to be meaningful what, then, is  implied by it? If you look at the newsflow you will see "news". Defined loosely as "notable events that have happend within the last approximately 24 hours". Interestingly, the "happend" here may also mean that a previous, sometimes much older, event has come to light (think #metoo), or that an existing story has taken a new turn. Thus, one of the reasons (but only one) why a player in the media landscape may opt to not comment on a given story is that the comment updates the story, and gives it new life and a new turn through the news cycle; or probably two new turns as there is likely to be comments upon the comment.

But, and this is where the genre label "real news" comes in, underlying this stream there may be other factors at play, some much more fundamental than what is made evident in the news cycle.

To add an example, picked again, as in previous posts, from the UK Brexit debate. When Theresa May declared a few days ago that the UK will leave the customs union when Brexit kicks in. she may do so to appeases the hard Brexiters in her party. However, by consequence, she also declares for a hard border in Northern Ireland and Gibraltar. The only alternative is to demand that the EU should no longer even try to control its own outer border, since that would be for the benefit of the UK, but is otherwise a fairly strange demand. This, in turn, fits into a much longer narrative of both the manifold twist and turns, and the overarching structural questions at play in the Brexit process.

The border/customs union double-bind, as well as the inept handling of it, is brilliantly caricatured by SKZ Cartoons:

So, returning to the starting point of this post, the news may be May's declaration of her intention for the UK to leave the customs union. The real news, however, is that this declaration is undercut even before she makes it. This is, obviously, slightly exasperating. As long as the attention of the news services stays in the news, you'll get an endless flutter of turns and twists that leaves nobody the wiser and only contributes to confusion and - ultimately - a dejection with politics.

However, the problem remains: the underlying story, critically important as it is, stays the same, and it all springs from the badly underpinned assumptions of the decision to Brexit. However, the real news usually does not change enough in a 24 hour cycle to make it into the news cycle. Thus, it most be a recurrent attempt to get complexity somehow represented in the more simplistic genres of the news cycle.

Therefore, if you want the real news represented in the news, the former must be constantly updated and recontextualized to match the latter. This, however, is usually more than can be handled within the famework of a fast moving news cycle, or within the individual story. So, the story roars on, and all we can do is to try to insert the real news into the stream of the news at opportune moments. Here, for instance, you can see an attempt to introduce the real news into the news of the customs union/border example mentioned above.

Moving back again to the genre perspective. news is an established genre; real news is not. However, it still much used, as it gives form to a recurrent rhetorical move: The attempt to contextualize the news, to tell the underlying, more slow-moving, story that is of more importance, and of a wider reach, than most of the news stories that appear in the news cycle.

Like many other genre moves, this one is a battleground. A person keen on Brexit might say that the real news is the EUs recurrent attempt at keeping the UK from winning its sovereignty back. The guiding opinion would be different, but the genre move would remain.

Thus, as often before, genres are fields of action: we have the news, the real news, the struggle over what the real news is, and the recurrent attempt (not covered here) by different actors to make their real news appear in the news. No wonder this is confusing.

Oh, and if you want to see more of SKZ Cartoon's brilliant work on Brexit look here.

Update
Even years later the real news story remains  well-nigh the same. Here is  SKZ Cartoons in late August 2019 after a meeting between newly "elected" PM Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel.

NB: Like the previous post, this one was originally a twitter thread. You can see the thread here.

Update April 16th, 2018: Added link forward to blog post about fake news genre labels in the first paragraph of this blog post.

Updated again 22 august, 2019. Cartoon from SKZ Cartoons added. You can find more of the artist's work here.

Genre, Persuasion and Truth in Public Opinion

It is a commonplace in contemporary genre studies that genres are something akin to omnipresent in human culture, communication and cognition, and, thus, that we as social beings learn, think and act through genres. (More on the basic tenets of genre studies here). In research, this is usually attributed to Carolyn Miller's groundbreaking article "Genre as Social Action" (1984 - more about it here). So, given that, we must expect any large scale campaign to influence public opinion to be deeply dependent on genres. This includes any participation in a large scale debate like the UK-Brexit debate (on genre in the Brexit debate here).

However, it is worth noticing, that genre use is never automatic. There is always an individual element involved. Amy Devitt puts it this way: "genres [...] live and breathe through individual instances and interactions across and within genres". (2009, 39) So, coming from the stance of genre research we would expect to find many genres creatively used, when we search for influences on public opinon.

To this we have to add one more point: Genres are regulators too, They enable particular ways of presenting any given topic, and they allow for different variations and deviances from what would usually be considered normal communication. The vagueness of that last sentence calls into question, of course, whether such a thing as "normal" communication even exists; in particular, given that I have already said that all communication is involved with genre.

But I digress. To understand what is meant by the claim that genres allow for different variations in communication, look at the slogan in the picture below.

The slogan, encountered on the central shopping street in Copenhagen, "Strøget" is on the front of - you guessed it - an Emporio Armani shop. It juxtaposes two statments "Everyone has a different story" and "Everyone wears Emporio Armani". Interestingly, the two statements may look alike, but there is a quite crucial distinction. The first statement is obviously true, the second is obviously not true. Not everone wears Armani. If for no other reason then simply because that stuff is expensive. Even if it is the cheaper Armani brand. In fact, the point of the slogan is probably to highlight how Emporio Armani is a more price-accessible brand than Armani proper.

Does the not-true claim then mean that Emporio Armani is lying in the slogan? Not by a long shot. The genre is "commercial slogan", and it is known that the truth felicity conditions of such a slogan are different than those of other genres. So you may blame the slogan if it causes you to make bad choices in couture purchases, if the stuff is overpriced, or if the product advertised is of bad quality. But claiming that the slogan lies by saying that everone wears Emporio Armani is silly.

Moving from this back to a parallel example from attempts to influence public opinion. A very obvious example of a genre used to influence public opnion is the election or referendum promise. Now, it is obvious that the election or referendum promise is social action: It is a form of persuasion. It is also obvious that it moves between norms and creativity/variation.

The promise is normative. It can only be effective, if the voters believe that it carries a certain weight. And it has to be formed in accordance with specific genre norms in order for the voters to even recognize it as a promise. At the same time the promise is creative. It has to be new, it has to inspire a feeling strong enough to make voters vote, and it has to distinguish the person or movement making the promise from the competition. If you successfully combine the two you get a rhetorically effective promise; one which acts in the situation, one which makes voters follow you.

However, the question remains: When can an election or referendum promise be said to be fraudulent; be said to be a lie or a manipulation? In particular, since in one sense they are all manipulations: they try to make us do what the utterer want. There is no free pass like the one, I just awarded the commercial slogan. If you say something you know to be false, in an election or referendum promise, you are indeed lying.

However, there are still complications. Let me stick to just one. Those of us who live in parliamentary systems based on proportional representation, rather than on first-past-the-post, know that minority governments or coalition governments are quite common. Single-party majority governments are hard to achieve. Thus, you must compromise, and some of the compromises WILL affect the promises you made during your election campaign. And - please note - this is not lying. This is a trade-off, and an intelligent electorate (oh does such a unicorn even exist?) will know that.

Why is it not lying? Because the electorate did not give the party the political strenght to follow its promise all the way through. Let me illustrate: An amazone captain tells her general "I will conquer this city if you give me 10.000 able bodied warriors". The general gives her 5.000, she attacks, but fails to conquer the city. But the general is not entitled to say: "You are a liar. You promised me to conquer the city."

Back to politics: This does not make the election or referendum promise void after the referendum. It merely sets the question: When can a politician or a political movement feasibly be said to have followed through on a campaign promise? Often, the answer must be case by case. But I think it could be feasibly said that an election promise is false/the promiser is lying if the promise contradicts established knowledge that was available to the promiser at the time the promise was made. Also, the promiser can prove false if the electorate gives her or him the political strength to fulfill the promise, nothing radical happens to block the promise, and the promise is still not acted coherently upon.

So, for instance, the infamous BrexitBus-promise (during the UK Brexit referendum campaign 2016 (see above) fails obviously on the first point. Not only was it known that the 350 million was far too high, it was also known at the time that the gain would be more than offset by losses on other counts. Thus, Emporio Armani may not have lied, but Boris Johnson sure did. The information was available and you had to be dumber than a bag of hammers, or seriously mislead, by false promises to buy into the assumptions underpinning the promise.

A promise which after-the-fact exposed a false promiser, was the recurrent claim before the election that "leave" did not imply that the UK would leave the Single Market. It is absolutely fair to say that you became what is known in the Brexit debate as a RemainerNow (a person who voted to leave the EU, but has since changed her mind) because UK-politicians failed this promise by working actively to take the country out of the single market and even claiming that this was the will of that aberrant metaphysical entity The Will of The People.

So, indeed, genre - as well as our interpretation and use of it - plays a crucial role in the shaping of public opinion. Though few reflect upon it, we are actually quite strong genre interpreters and genre users (read more here).
This post, like the preceeding one, is based on a twitter thread. Find the original thread here.

Brexit Genres

I am supposedly on Twitter to discuss genre research (my twitterhandle is indeed  @genreresearch). However, as a huge fan of the EU, I have been lured into spending quite a bit of time hanging around the #FBPE-crowd and discussing Brexit instead. 

Or is that indeed "instead"? A central finding of genre studies is that genre is well-nigh omnipresent in human culture, cognition, and communication. Thus, we think, react, and act in genre patterns, and we all have a surprising aptitude for understanding and using genre. Thus, if you participate in the Brexit debate it may never have entered your mind that you are constantly using and discussing genre. But you are.

Allow me to show you.

At the center of the Brexit debate (itself a genre) is a thing called a "referendum". That's a genre. Moreover, this particular referendum had as its particular character that it was an "advisory referendum". A variant genre or, if you will, subgenre to the referendum. Now, as you know, the fact that this was an "advisory referendum" meant that a number of safeguards connected to stonger referendums (for example a demand for a supermajority) were not present. Had such safeguards been in place, Brexit wouldn´t be on its way

However, and this is, as you still know very well, just not in those terms, the result of the advisory referendum result (another genre) was taken up, not as a narrow win (yet another genre), but as an expression (genre) of a metaphysical entity called The Will of The People. This nonewithstanding that there were critical problems connected to several crucial genres in connection with the advisory referendum. One being that one of the campaigns (genre) leading up to the referendum were dominated by lies (yet another genre). Another genre which should ideally have played a crucial role to both campaigns, the "expert testimony", was aggressively discounted beforehand, and never got to play its necessary part in enligtening the decision of the voters.

Then, of course, there was the hidden asymmetry of the "voting ballot" (yep that's a genre too) which displayed to completly unequal opportunities, one well-known and stable (remain) another almost wholly unknown and highly dramatic (leave) as if they were similar.

And this is just the beginning. The resulting "advise", taken up as a "decision", gave rise to "negotiations", and "debates", including (far too few) "parliamentary debates". Into this came "newspaper headlines" and "articles" leading to, among other things "death threats". Leading, of course, to the rise of a number of "SoMe interchanges" which helped form "hashtags" (yep, a genre). So basically y'all. While we are FBPE-ing, we are also acting in accordance with a set of genre expectations.

This post is a genre-reconfiguration. It was originally a Twitter thread. You can see the thread here. After the thread I have added a number of specimen of other, more special genres I have found in the Brexit debate. Check it out.