Learning about Genre with ChatGPT

Or, counteracting ChatGPT's tendency toward formalism.

I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus between conference travel and a trip to see the solar eclipse. The latter was well worth it: a cosmic event that reminded me of my small place in the vastness of the universe. It’s good to be humbled a bit. The former—at trip to Spokane for the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)—was instructive because I got to see how thinking about generative AI is evolving, or not, in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies. I am especially excited about the prospect of guidance on critical AI literacy from the MLA-CCCC Task Force on Writing and AI, which I anticipate will shape our field’s thinking about the technology.

However, not everyone is so forward-thinking or critically informed in their perspectives on generative AI. I was particularly troubled by a presenter who marveled at the potential for using ChatGPT to teach genre, not because this is impossible, but because she seemed to have defaulted to what I see as an outdated conception of genre as form. Let me explain.

Image courtesy of Adobe.

We’re used to thinking about genre as a category or type of text that shares common features. Think: country music, romantic comedies, or epistolary novels. These categories can serve as useful a shorthand, but they can pose problems for teaching writing. First, their edges are often burry. For example, Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses blends the western with the coming-of-age novel. Second, some genre labels are huge buckets that contain a lot of textual variety, perhaps none so much as “the essay,” which has spawned a host of sub-genres like the personal essay and the journalistic essay. Third, genres change over time. Compare style, organization, and standards of evidence in an experimental article in physics from 1885 with one today, and you’ll get the point.

People in my field have largely replaced this formal notion of genre with the idea that genre is social action (first suggested by Carolyn Miller 40 years ago now). In this formulation, we (writers and creators of all stripes) encounter situations that recur; we try out different strategies for response, and when we hit upon one that works, we use it again. If we recognize a new need that we didn’t encounter or see before, we make adjustments. A simple, oft-cited example is the grocery list, which some people miraculously manage to organize according to their typical way of navigating the store. (I’ve never managed to do this.) When the store gets reorganized, so does the list. When the store offers curbside pickup, maybe the list gets digitized on an app and doesn’t require any particular organization—although the user’s old habits may still determine how they use it.

In short, this notion of genre is rhetorical, based on the needs of writers/rhetors/creators, their audiences, and the circumstances surrounding the text. Any formal features are there not because they are natural or “the rules,” but because they served a purpose once before and are likely to serve that purpose again.

At the conference, the presenter kept saying that students could use ChatGPT to learn genres by prompting it to produce examples, in this case a cover letter. There’s nothing wrong with looking for samples, of course; it’s just that samples alone don’t teach us about the complex rhetorical thinking that goes into wielding a genre, especially a high-stakes one like a cover letter. A genre’s formal features alone can’t help us understand what will compel an audience, the amount of variation they will accept, or the ways genres are interlinked.

All this led me to ask: could students learn a new genre from ChatGPT with a rhetorically-rich understanding? I’ll give a bit of a spoiler: the answer is yes, but only if they have a sense of genre as social action in the first place.

---

To test this question, I conducted several sessions with ChatGPT using different approaches to understanding the genre of the press release. In my first chat, I simply asked it to write a sample press release, and then to explain its rhetorical decision-making. It told me about structure, clarity, and engaging headline, relevant and impact, the use of quotes, detailed features, a call to action, and company background. While occasionally rhetorical (e.g., a quote “adds a human element and provides authority”), the big picture here is distinctly formalist, as I anticipated.

My second chat, likewise started with a fairly formalist approach to the genre, but I wanted more. Playing the part of student, I asked it to explain what it might mean to say that genre is not just form, and how it might apply to press releases. Here things got better, with ideas about audience expectations, style, purpose, and context. For example:

Context: The context in which a press release is written affects its content significantly. This includes the timing of the release, the current news climate, cultural considerations, and even the specific media outlets being targeted. A press release about a new technological innovation would look very different if aimed at niche tech bloggers versus mainstream media outlets.

Here we start to see hints at genre variety that depend on audience and context. From there, I had ChatGPT prompt me with a series of questions to help me build a press release for a hypothetical tech company who just got a big contract, after which I asked it to advise me on distribution. The press release wasn’t half bad for a first draft and a fake situation.

Finally, I asked it to summarize what we had learned about press releases and how we might apply the techniques to learn other genres. Here I will quote at length:

Key Components of Press Releases

1. Structured Format: Press releases follow a specific format, including a headline, dateline, introduction, body, boilerplate, and contact information. Understanding how to structure content according to specific guidelines is applicable to many other forms of professional and academic writing.

2. Conciseness and Clarity: Press releases are concise and focus on delivering clear information quickly. This skill is essential in any writing where space is limited or clarity is paramount, such as executive summaries, policy documents, or even academic abstracts.

3. Audience Awareness: Knowing your audience is critical. For a press release, the audience typically includes journalists and through them, the general public. Tailoring the language, tone, and content to suit the audience's preferences and expectations is a transferable skill relevant to any genre, such as fiction, business reports, or scholarly articles.

4. Purpose-Driven Writing: Press releases are written with the purpose of informing and enticing the media to write about the news. Each genre has a purpose, and understanding what your writing needs to achieve is crucial for effectiveness, whether you’re crafting a persuasive essay, a research paper, or a sales pitch.

5. Engagement Techniques: Using engaging elements like compelling headlines, quotes, and critical information in the lead paragraph to hook the reader is useful not only in press releases but in other forms of writing like blogs, feature articles, and even novels.

Applying These Skills to Other Genres

• Learn the Conventions: Just as you need to know the specific structure and style of a press release, learn the conventions specific to any new genre you’re tackling. This could be the format of a screenplay, the citation style in academic writing, or the narrative structure in fiction.

• Practice Brevity and Clarity: These are universally valuable across all writing disciplines. Practicing these in press releases can make you adept at expressing ideas succinctly and clearly, a skill highly valued in professional and academic contexts.

• Adapt to the Audience and Purpose: Understanding your audience and purpose will help you choose the right tone, style, and content, whether you’re writing a technical manual or a wedding speech.

• Engage Your Reader: Learning to capture interest quickly is crucial in today’s fast-paced world of information. Techniques learned for press releases can help you think about how to engage an audience right from the start, no matter the genre.

By mastering the skills required to write an effective press release, you not only become proficient in this specific genre but also build a toolkit of adaptable, versatile writing skills that can be tailored to meet the demands of any new writing challenge you encounter. This approach to learning and applying writing principles across different contexts will enhance your overall communication abilities, making you a stronger and more effective writer.

I have to admit I was somewhat disappointed by this answer. It’s fine to discuss conventions, audience, and purpose, but brevity and clarity are not universally agreed-upon values. More important, the answer still does not tell me how to understand the relationships among all these rhetorical elements of the genre, or of any genre.

Therefore, in my third chat, I asked ChatGPT directly about the differences between formal and rhetorical definitions of genre. After definitions (including a nod to Caroly Miller!), it offered this comparison:

• Form vs. Function: Genre-as-form focuses on internal, formal features (form), while genre as typified rhetorical actions emphasizes the purpose and function of genres within specific contexts (function).

• Stability vs. Dynamism: The genre-as-form approach often implies a certain stability and timelessness of genres based on their formal attributes. In contrast, the typified rhetorical action approach suggests that genres are more dynamic and evolve as the situations and needs of their users change.

• Analytical Focus: Literary analysis under the genre-as-form model often centers on how well texts conform to or innovate within formal constraints. The typified rhetorical actions model, however, would analyze how effectively texts respond to and fulfill the needs of particular situations.

Not half bad! It also provided some useful advice on using both approaches to learn a new genre, and even analyzed a press release from OpenAI using each approach separately and in tandem. Its last point was insightful: “In sum, this press release from OpenAI uses the genre’s formal conventions to ensure clarity and accessibility while strategically addressing the rhetorical needs of reassurance and information dissemination in light of significant organizational change. This holistic understanding of genre helps in both crafting and interpreting such texts effectively.”

Finally, I asked it to explain possible relationships between press releases and other genres using the notion of uptake, which is basically the way one genre makes use of another genre (again, like a cover letter leads to an interview). I was especially taken with its consideration of interactions with legal documents:

Interaction with Legal Documents

• Uptake Process: For companies in regulated industries, or when announcements involve legal or regulatory issues (like mergers and acquisitions), press releases might be influenced by legal documents and requirements.

• Influence: This can lead to a press release that is carefully worded to comply with legal guidelines, and which may also serve as a public-facing summary of more detailed legal documents.

Now we’re talking! Here we can really start to gain an understanding of the complex rhetorical negotiations that may take place when writers use some genres in some situations.

---

All in all, then, ChatGPT wasn’t perfect, but eventually did offer some sophisticated takes on genre as a concept and on the specific genre of the press release. To me, it performed best when explicitly prompted to take up the concept of genre in its explanations, examples, and analyses. Otherwise it defaulted to a thinly rhetorical formalism.

Crucially, its best results still required me to know a thing or two about genre theory in the first place. This suggests to me that writing courses that engage explicitly with rhetorically and theoretically rich conceptions of writing may be essential for preparing students to use generative AI to understand and compose new, complicated genres.