Assessement Revision: genres

For those of you who misplaced the handout. Here it is. Review it again for the exam.

Introduction to Genres

Genre: a particular type or class of literary, musical, or artistic composition.


Autobiography: the story of a person’s life, written or told by that person.

Biography: the story of a real person’s life, written or told by another person. Frequent subjects
of biographies are movie stars, television personalities, politicians, sports figures,
self-made millionaires, and underworld figures.

Dramas: a story written to be acted for an audience [a drama can also be appreciated and enjoyed
in written form]. The action is usually driven by characters who want something very
much and take steps to get it. Dramas are separated into acts and then further into
scenes.

Essay: a short piece of nonfiction prose that examines a single subject. Essay’s are normally
categorized as either personal or formal.
Personal: reveals a great deal about the writer’s personality and tastes. Focus is the
writers feelings and response to an experience.
Formal: usually serious, objective, and impersonal in tone. The purpose is to inform
readers about a topic or to persuade them to accept the writer’s views.

Fable: a brief story in prose or verse that teaches a moral or gives a practical lesson about how to
get along in life. The characters of most fables are animals that behave and speak like
human beings.

Fiction: a prose account that is made up rather than true. Fiction usually refers to novels and
short stories, and may be based on a writer’s experiences or on historical events, but
characters, events, and other details are altered or added by the writer to create a desired
effect.

Folk Tale: a story with no known author that originally was passed on from one generation to
another by word of mouth.

Free Verse: poetry without a regular meter or a rhyme scheme. Poets writing in free verse try to
capture the natural rhythms of ordinary speech and frequently make use of vivid
imagery. May use internal rhyme, repetition, alliteration, and onomatopoeia.

Myth: a story that explains something about the world and typically involves gods or other
superhuman beings. Myths reflect the traditions of the culture that produced them, and
most cultures have stories that explain how something in the world came to be. Myths also explain many other aspects of nature. Myths are very old and were passed on orally long before being put into written form.


Nonfiction: prose writing that deals with real people, events, and places without changing any
facts. Examples include autobiographies, biographies, and the essay, but also newspaper stories, articles, reports and diaries and letters. Nonfiction can be both subjective and objective.

Poetry: a kind of rhythmic, compressed language that uses figures of speech and imagery
designed to appeal to emotion and imagination. Poetry is usually arranged in a particular way on a page, and often has a regular pattern of rhythm and may have a regular rhyme scheme.

Short Story: a fictional prose narrative that is usually ten to twenty book pages long. Short
stories usually have only one or two major characters and one important setting, and
they all have an introduction, a conflict, complications, climax and resolution.