In 1984, Carolyn Miller’s “Genre as Social Action” was published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, laying the foundation for what we now call Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS). In this oft-cited piece, Miller outlines a theory of genre “centered not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish” (151). Genres, Miller argues, are not collections of static textual conventions, but rather “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (159).
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric