"Hold on Loosely" - a quick thanks

So my SXSWi core conversation "Hold On Loosely" was held today. I just wanted to say a quick thanks to everyone who attended and contributed. It was surprisingly rewarding, and my big takeway is that my next research project may have to push beyond local independent contractors and coworking spaces toward distributed teams.

Just a few links before I go back into SXSWi mode:

• If you wondered what the session would have looked like if I had used slides, see my RISE presentation.
• To read more about coworking, see my ongoing profiles of coworking spaces.
• If you want to know more about some of the research I've done in Austin, my TILTS presentation is up too - 50 slides, 15 minutes.
• Oh, and here's my SXSWi2010 slide deck on coworking.

I'll plan to sum up the core conversation sometime next week. Til then, if you're at SXSW this year and want to touch base, tweet me @spinuzzi. Thanks, everyone.

Reading :: Genre: An Introduction

Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy
By Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff

Since I bought my Kindle, I've been looking for books available as free PDF downloads. It's just so convenient, and frankly, I expect to be reading a lot more PDFs than Kindle books on this thing. In any case, one good source of such PDF books is The WAC Clearinghouse. Some of the books were published by presses, then discontinued and their rights reverted to the authors; others were commissioned for the series in conjunction with Parlor Press.

This particular book, by Bawarshi and Reiff, is of the latter variety. Published in 2010, it aims to do exactly what the subtitle says: introduce us to the history, theory, research, and pedagogy of genre. And it does a remarkably good job. These two scholars have absorbed a really amazing amount of material, examining genre in literary traditions, systemic functional linguistics, historical/corpus linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, rhetorical and sociological traditions (including the Brazilian Genre Synthesis), and rhetorical genre studies (RGS). That's just Part 1 - and the chapters in this part function as a massive framework essay on the concept of genre.

In Part 2, the authors examine genre research in several different contexts, including academic; workplace and professional; and public and new media contexts. Again, they do a tremendous amount of review here, sensitively discussing the research on each context.

Part 3 goes to school, examining various pedagogical approaches to teaching genres. Rhetorical Genre Studies gets its own chapter here.

Overall, I'm very impressed with the book's sheer scope and treatment of the material. Yes, in a far-ranging survey such as this one, some things get lost - but the authors lose much less than I might have expected. They clearly understand the material from many different angles, and they provide and contextualize a wealth of information; my Kindle notes are almost all along the lines of "get this cite!"

If you're planning to teach a graduate seminar on genre, or if you are just interested in the different genre traditions out there, go download this book. It's a terrific resource.