ABSTRACT
It’s odd to describe something by what it’s not – in this case, non-fiction. It seems as though it isn’t genuinely a category at all if it can’t be named – and perhaps, in the case of ‘non-fiction’ this is so. Some people prefer the terms ‘nonnarrative’ or ‘non-chronological’ but these can include poetry and other forms of reflective writing, and non-fiction can be narrative, of course. Perhaps the lack of a genuinely useful general description reveals the substance of the problem – that such forms of writing occupy more of a continuum than separate categories and that often there are overlaps. What is more, as technology offers greater access to different kinds of text making, new forms of writing develop. How might we categorise chat-room writing or
interactive involvement in hypertext writing? How are multimodal texts categorised since they depend on display features for their coherence and cohesions? Changes in ‘textnology’ demand new ways of describing texts.
