Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi’s edited volume, Genre and the Performance of Publics, was released during a time when I felt that Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) had started to stabilize in terms of advances within the field. Decades of quality research into the different genres found in various socio-institutional settings (e.g., academic, professional and community contexts) had developed many useful and insightful concepts; RGS scholars had found their “normal science”, to borrow Thomas Kuhn’s phrase. One such “normalized” concept is Anne Freadman’s notion of “uptake”. As Reiff and Bawarshi explain, uptake has been used to examine the ways that genres shape rhetorical responses and how broader discursively-constructed ideas filter into our daily lives and re-appear in unique ways, such as by shaping our behaviour.

Please see 'Notes' below for any suggested/official citation information added by the author(s) of this work. Otherwise, you can cite the HSS Commons instance of this publication as follows:

• Falconer, M., (2025), "Reiff, M. & Bawarshi, A. (Eds.). (2016). Genre and the Performance of Publics. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.31468/cjsdwr.613)

  Copy Citation | Export metadata as... | JSON | CSV | RO-Crate | BibTex | EndNote

1. Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie

Original publication: Falconer, Matthew. "Reiff, M. & Bawarshi, A. (Eds.). (2016). Genre and the Performance of Publics. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.." Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, vol. 27, 2017, pp. 106-113. DOI: 10.31468/cjsdwr.613. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in DW/R is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license