Genre Worlds: The Discursive Shaping of Knowledge (Discourse/Genre/Grammar‪)‬

The thesis I want to argue in this article is a simple and in some ways rather formalistic one: that textual meaning is carried by formal structures more powerfully than by explicit thematic content; that what texts do and how they are structured have greater force than what they say they are about; and that genre--by which I mean merely the kinds of talking and writing, of imaging and of structured sound--is perhaps the most important of the structures by which texts are organized. (1) Consider the following piece of writing, displayed recently for a few hours on hoardings in the streets of Edinburgh: