Editing Genre (section)

==Linguistics==
In [[philosophy of language]], genre figures prominently in the works of philosopher and literary scholar [[Mikhail Bakhtin]]. Bakhtin's basic observations were of "speech genres" (the idea of [[heteroglossia]]), modes of speaking or writing that people learn to mimic, weave together, and manipulate (such as "formal letter" and "grocery list", or "university lecture" and "personal anecdote"). In this sense, genres are socially specified: recognized and defined (often informally) by a particular culture or community. The work of [[Georg Lukács]] also touches on the nature of [[literary genre]]s, appearing separately but around the same time (1920s–1930s) as Bakhtin. [[Norman Fairclough]] has a similar concept of genre that emphasizes the social context of the text: Genres are "different ways of (inter)acting discoursally" (Fairclough, 2003: 26).

A text's genre may be determined by its:

# Linguistic function.
# Formal traits.
# Textual organization.
# Relation of communicative situation to formal and organizational traits of the text (Charaudeau and Maingueneau, 2002:278–280).