If a blank page or empty screen scares you, join the club. Even professional writers freeze up when facing new and unfamiliar assignments or intimidating audiences. It’s only natural for you to wonder how you’ll handle all the tasks you face in school or on the job—the reports, evaluations, personal statements, opinion pieces, reviews, and more. Much more. Even writing you do for pleasure has a learning curve.

So how do you get rolling? Exactly the way experienced authors do, by examining the strategies other writers have used to achieve similar goals for demanding audiences. That’s not very creative, you might object. But in fact, it’s the way inventive people in many fields operate. They get a feel for the shape and features, structures and strategies, materials and styles of whatever they hope to construct themselves, and then they work from that knowledge to fashion new ideas. They become masters of their genre. This book will introduce you to writing by taking exactly the same approach.

Understand Genres of Writing

So what is a genre? An old-school definition might describe it as a variety of writing we recognize by its distinctive purpose and features. For instance, a work that fits into the genre of narrative usually tells a story and emphasizes characterization, dialogue, and descriptions; a report presents reliable facts and information and relies on research and documentation; an argument defends a claim with reasons and evidence and uses lots of powerful language and even, sometimes, pulls at your heartstrings. How To Write Anything introduces you to these three familiar genres, along with five others you’ll run up against throughout your academic and professional life: evaluations, causal analyses, proposals, literary analyses, and rhetorical analyses.

But if you are expecting simple formulas, templates, and step-by-step instructions for each category, guess again. No one learns to write by filling in blanks because the processes are too complicated. So this book treats genres far more dynamically—as real-life responses to ever-changing writing situations. You’ll find that genres aren’t arbitrary, inflexible, predictable, or dull. Instead, they change constantly—maybe the better term is evolve—to serve the needs of writers and readers. (Consider how just in the past few years personal and professional letters have metamorphosed into e-mails, text messages, and tweets.)

Though it still makes sense to draw upon patterns and models that work reliably, that’s only half the process of learning to write. First you study what existing genres can teach you (and that’s a lot). Then you bend the genres to fit actual assignments you get and, just as important, the kind of work you’d like to do on your own. You figure out what to say within a genre, tailor those concepts to the people you hope to influence, organize your ideas strategically, and state them powerfully in appropriate media—including visual, oral, and online formats. That’s what Part 1 of How to Write Anything is about. It walks you through the full range of choices you face in making genres work for you—and not the other way around.

It might help to think of genres as shortcuts to success. When you learn a new genre, you don’t necessarily acquire a hard-and-fast set of rules for writing; instead, you gain control over that genre’s possibilities. Who knows where those insights might take you?

Connect Purpose to Subgenres

But let’s step back a moment and think about the “specific assignments” you’ll be facing, especially in school. One of the first matters to settle is always the aim or purpose of a given paper, and it is rarely just to write or even to compose open-ended narratives, reports, or arguments. Instead, you’ll be asked or required to compose projects so narrowly focused that they actually turn broad genres into subgenres. A subgenre is simply a specialized version of a genre, one that adapts its general principles to immediate purposes: For example, you need to tell a good story to talk yourself out of an expensive parking ticket or into an honors program.

To put it more formally, you won’t ordinarily compose a nonspecific report; you’ll write a history term paper detailing some aspect of the Cuban Missile Crisis or a newspaper column explaining NCAA recruitment policies. You won’t do a causal analysis for the exercise; you’ll write a topic proposal to determine the feasibility of a thesis idea. You won’t argue just for the fun of it; you’ll dash off an editorial to persuade student government to fix its election code. In effect, you are encouraged to modify a genre to fit your more immediate needs. And that’s a good thing.

Why? Because you can base your work in subgenres on very specific models readily available in print and online—they’re materials you read and work with every day. In How to Write Anything, for instance, the chapter on “Evaluations” presents basic strategies for making smart judgments about people and things, explaining in detail how to establish and apply criteria of evaluation and how to present the evidence you collect. Fair enough.

But your purpose in preparing (or even reading) evaluations will often be much more focused. You’ll want to know whether a restaurant is worth your dollar, a book is smart and challenging, a school program up-to-snuff academically. So you’ll likely consult book, restaurant, or program reviews you’ve come to regard as trustworthy, probably because of how well they handle criteria of evaluation and evidence. Once you know how a genre works, you’ll appreciate how its subgenres refine those moves. Suddenly, your task as a writer is easier because knowing a genre gives you a method and vocabulary for dealing with all its subgenres—and appreciating how they operate.

Subgenres, then, work the same way as genres, presenting an array of specific features and strategies for you to emulate and modify. You’ll find connections between genre and subgenres throughout How to Write Anything. Each of the major readings in Part 1 is identified by a subgenre, and all the major writing assignments suggest that you take one of the items as a pattern to help you with a project of your own. Part 2 “Special Assignments” is entirely about subgenres crucial to people in school or entering the job market—items such as essay examinations, résumés, personal statements, and oral reports. In this section, you’ll clearly see how practical and action-oriented subgenres can be. At the end of this introduction, you’ll find a list of the genres and subgenres covered in How to Write Anything.

Choose Audiences

Remember the claim that genres serve the needs of writers and demanding audiences? It’s very important. As an analogy, just consider how much you rely on genres to select what movies you will see: sci-fi films, westerns, action/adventure films, romances (a.k.a. “chick flicks”), horror movies, and so on. You bring expectations to films in these categories based upon your past experiences. You may be satisfied when a movie meets or exceeds your expectations, angry when a work fails to live up to genre standards, and really excited when a flick manages to do something new—stretches a genre the way The Dark Knight or Marvel’s The Avengers did.

Readers of your work will react the same way, which is why you’ll find sections on “Understanding Your Audience” in each of the genre chapters of How to Write Anything. Audiences you target with a particular genre will bring specific expectations to your work, based on their understanding of your project. For example, a highly academic genre such as a “literary analysis” usually has a narrower and more demanding readership than, let’s say, a movie review you post on a blog. You’ve got to learn how to make genres work for their typical readers—which means understanding them or at least being aware of what they bring to the table when they read.

But as a writer working in genres, you’ll also discover you have the power sometimes to define or summon audiences for your work. You might, for example, decide to write a report on bullying aimed at middle-school students; it would differ significantly from a report on the same topic aimed at parents, wouldn’t it? Or you might consider how academic readers might be convinced to take a topic such as zombies in films seriously: What features in your text would signal your serious intentions to them? Your analysis of such choices is exactly what makes writing within genres exciting and challenging.

Manage Structure and Style

How to Write Anything gives as much attention to structure and style as to audience in each of the genre chapters—and for good reason. Like the treatment of audience, these elements can make genres seem familiar and comfortable, or they can stretch their boundaries to breaking, depending entirely on choices you make.

Many subgenres, for example, are rigid in their organization: You wouldn’t want to experiment with the structure of a lab report or grant application. Nor would you take chances with the formal style expected in these documents. Get a little funky and you’ve flunked chemistry or lost your funding. Common sense, you say, and you’d be right.

But other genres have lots of give, and so chapters on these genres suggest how that flexibility creates opportunities for innovation and experimentation. For instance, not all narratives have to move in lockstep from beginning to middle to end, but if you are going to tell a story out of sequence or via flashbacks, there are consequences: You might befuddle some readers and push them away. Or think about the range of style you have in narratives—from descriptions that are elegant and formal to dialogue that tells it like it is. You might even use these choices of style to attract readers you want—that is, people who share your values or taste. Even a genre as sober as evaluation has room for enormous range in structure and style—which we signal in this edition by featuring a satire as one of the models.

Develop Writing Processes

For more than a generation now, writing has been taught in schools as a sequential process. You probably learned it that way, working steadily from finding ideas, developing them, writing a first draft, and proofreading a final one. There’s nothing wrong with the model, especially the parts that encourage revision. But in working with genres, you’ll discover that writing behaviors grow more complicated. Simply put, there are many processes and pathways to successful composing.

Each chapter in Part 1 of How to Write Anything outlines a process for creating a particular genre. Some kinds of writing require intense personal reflection, others send reporters into the field for interviews or into libraries for research, and still others may push you deep inside texts for experiences in close reading. Some genres will develop your skills with media or make you examine the clarity of charts and graphs. Others will have you playing with and repeatedly refining your choice of words.

Because of these individual demands, you’ll discover that all the genre chapters in the Guide section of How to Write Anything (Parts 1–2) are strategically cross-referenced to supplemental materials in what’s called the “Reference” section (Parts 3–9). The reference chapters are designed to support your specific needs as a writer, whatever the genre you might be exploring. If you have a problem with writer’s block, you will find detailed advice to get you moving. If a genre assignment pushes you to a library catalog, a reference chapter will explain the tools and resources you’ll find there and offer sensible strategies. If you have to document a paper or you’ve forgotten how to get pronouns to agree with fussy antecedents, you have a place to go. It’s worth noting that the reference chapters are, for the most part, written in the same informal style as the rest of the book. So don’t ignore them. You might even find stuff there to write about.

Invitation to Write

How to Write Anything was designed and edited to be compact and efficient. But you’ll find that it has a personal voice, frank and occasionally humorous. Why? Because yet another textbook lacking style or character probably won’t convince you that your own prose should speak to real audiences. And if some chapters operate like reference materials, they still aren’t written coldly or dispassionately—not even the section on Common Errors.

If How to Write Anything seems like an oddly ambitious title, maybe it’s because learning to write should be a heady enterprise, undertaken with confidence and optimism. Give it a try.

Genres and Subgenres in How to Write Anything