"Reproducibles, rubrics, and everything you need": Genre theory today

Abstract

If you had typed genre into amazon.com's search engine on a certain day in March 2007, you would have come up with an initial ten listings that included two gay men's magazines (Genre and Instinct Magazine), one introductory theoretical text (my own Genre), a compact disc by a group called D-Genre, a composition textbook (Tom Romano's Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers), three resource kits for children (Carson-Dellosa's Literary Genres, Susan Ludwig's Twenty-Four Ready-to-Go Genre Book Reports: Engaging Activities with Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need to Help Students Get the Most Out of Their Independent Reading, and a bulletin-board set entitled BB Set Genres of Lit), and, finally, two school textbooks (Tara McCarthy's Teaching Genre (Grades 4–8) and Heather Lattimer's Thinking through Genre: Units of Study in Reading and Writing Workshops 4–12).