ABSTRACT
Carolyn Miller is widely considered the founder of North American rhetorical genre studies, a subfield of rhetoric and composition. Her groundbreaking essay, “Genre as Social Action,” published in The Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1984, sparked a scholarly debate, still vibrant today, about the differences between genres and forms based on rhetorical situations. Though recognizing that genres have recurring patterns of textual conventions, Miller views genres as primarily human, social constructs with a pragmatic orientation. She has consistently argued that genres arise as a response to recurring rhetorical situations grounded in complex communities, where audience expectations shape how genres emerge and change. In order to clarify the idea that genres are “cultural artifacts,” Miller revisited her essay and published “Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre” in 1994. Later, because of her growing interest in the rhetorical aspects of digital media, Miller analyzed the emerging genre of the digital blog in “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog” (2004). Her latest work, “Discourse Genres”(2016), published in The Handbook of Verbal Communication, highlights her interdisciplinary focus on communication science, linguistics, and the cognitive sciences.
