Civic and Professional Genres for Composition Courses   Summary The new guidelines for our composition programs indicate that students will be given formal writing assignments that span multiple "genres." This document provides further information about what those genres may be and includes several example genres and sample assignments. What is a genre? For our purposes in composition, genre is understood in relation to discourse communities, audiences, and purposes and might be applied at different levels of specificity. That is, just as we can say that the novel is a genre and that sci-fi novels are a genre, we can also say that technical communication is a genre and that software help documentation is a genre (of technical communication). As such, even though we can think of many different academic genres (and we could certainly assign different academic genres to our students), the goal of writing in multiple genres is also to move beyond the genres of writing associated with higher education to genres written in professional and civic discourse communities. Examples of genres Though it would seem logical that genres ought to fit neatly into taxonomic categories, they don't really function that way as there are different ways of conceiving of genres (e.g. length/media type [e.g. brochures, reports, websites], purposes [educational, sales, entertainment], audiences [experts, students, clients, employees, general public, government officials] and so on). What follows then is a non-exhaustive list of genres that might possibly be assigned in a composition course. The fourteen examples below are constructed with certain degrees of specificity but obviously are open to variation: a brochure describing one's major written for interested high school students; a technical guide for incoming students on using social media for educational benefit; a proposal to the university to improve new student orientation; a journalistic feature article about student participation in the SGA; an interview with a friend or family member about his/her literacy experiences; a press release from a corporation announcing a new product or service; a white paper from a non-profit organization (e.g. an Electronic Freedom Foundation white paper on the surveillance of college student file sharing); a political manifesto on saving the environment; a letter to the editor about an issue currently being debated in Congress; a travel guide either written about one's hometown or a place one has visited; a fanzine article written about one's favorite band, video game, movie, etc; a grant application for funding for a cultural event on campus; letters of appreciation for participants in a service learning project; a sequence of abstracts for articles/essays read for the class.