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Anne Freadman’s essay dramatically expanded my idea of what genre is and how we use it, and take it for granted, every day. One part I found interesting was her description of how the place and the “props” for a text, and for a social situation in her metaphor, determine what kind (what “genre”) of text or situation it is. Two business people having a conversation over a desk will act differently than they would talking about the same subject over a lunch table. She says that one is not less ritualistic that the other, though; everything we do/read is governed by rules, we just “choose one ritual instead of another.”

A “genre” debate in the same vein might be the familiar differences between writing an email and writing a letter. Here, the setting or the place of the text determines what kind of text it is. Even though an email is supposed to be less formal than a letter, it’s easy to labor over how to express what I want to say in a way that is appropriately casual or otherwise, depending on who I’m writing to. In other words, there are still expectations and conventions, even though an email is in a different genre than a letter. I understood her argument to be that the context and the placement of words has much to do with their meaning; in fact, that the meaning is not the same at all if it is moved from its context, and that this applies not only to texts but to pretty much everything else, too. It’s interesting how she sees the study of genres as the study of everything.