Welcome to Genre and Text-Type Conventions
Have you ever opened an app, glanced at a post for half a second, and immediately known whether it was a news report, a meme, or an advertisement? You did not need a label to tell you. Your brain instantly recognised its conventions — the visual layout, the tone, and the type of language used.
In IB MYP Language and Literature, understanding genre and text-type conventions is one of your most valuable superpowers. When you sit for the on-screen eAssessment, you will be given unseen texts to analyse (Criterion A) and prompts to respond to creatively (Criterion C). Recognising how genres work allows you to unlock what a creator is doing and why they chose that specific form.
Note on curriculum connections: This chapter explores how forms and genres are constructed. To explore how writers tailor these conventions to specific audiences and goals, see Purpose, context and audience; to see how different texts talk to one another across forms, see Intertextuality and connections between texts.
---1. What Are Genre and Text-Type Conventions?
Let us break down the core terminology step by step:
Genre: A category or kind of text grouped by shared characteristics, themes, or techniques (for example: prose fiction, poetry, drama, or literary non-fiction).
Text type: The specific form a piece of writing takes to achieve a goal (for example: a travel memoir, an opinion column, an advertisement, a formal speech, or an infographic).
Conventions: The expected features, "rules", or typical patterns associated with a specific genre or text type. These include layout, sentence style, register, tone, and structural choices.
Think of it like a dress code: If you attend a formal banquet in swimming gear, you are deliberately breaking the expected conventions. In literature, when a creator follows conventions, they create familiarity and clarity. When they twist or break them, they create surprise, humour, or tension.
Quick Memory Trick: The "FLIRT" Checklist
When you encounter an unseen text, remember FLIRT to spot its conventions:
• Form & Layout: What does it look like on the page or screen? Headings, stanzas, columns, bullet points?
• Language & Vocabulary: Is the diction formal, conversational, technical, or figurative?
• Intention: Is the text trying to entertain, persuade, inform, reflect, or instruct?
• Register & Tone: Is it serious, ironic, playful, solemn, or urgent?
• Typical Structures: Does it have a narrative arc, chronological sequence, call-and-response, or headline-and-lead?
Key Takeaway: Conventions are the established ingredients of a text type. Spotting them helps you explain how a creator shapes meaning and guides the audience's response.
---2. Literary Genres: Examining Creative Forms
In your eAssessment tasks and classroom units, you will examine various literary forms. Here is how their conventions function:
A. Literary Prose Fiction Extracts
Prose fiction uses imagined narrative to explore ideas, characters, and conflicts.
• Key conventions: Narrative voice (first person "I", third-person limited, or third-person omniscient), dialogue, character development, setting description, plot pacing, and figurative language (metaphor, simile, personification).
• Look out for: Shifts in perspective or point of view, shifts in tone, and moments of tension or foreshadowing.
B. Poetry
Poetry condenses thought, feeling, and sensory experience using heightened language and deliberate structural patterns.
• Key conventions: Stanza breaks, line breaks, enjambment, rhythm, sound devices (alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia), and rich imagery.
• Look out for: How the visual shape on the page reinforces the poem's mood, and how changes in rhythm emphasize critical ideas.
C. Drama Extracts
Drama is written primarily to be spoken and enacted before an audience.
• Key conventions: Dialogue, stage directions (indicating tone, movement, or setting), monologue, dramatic irony, and character conflict.
• Look out for: Subtext — what characters mean beneath what they are actually saying, and how stage directions reveal power dynamics.
D. Literary Non-Fiction (Memoirs, Travel Writing, Personal Essays)
Literary non-fiction tells real-life stories using the artistic techniques of fiction.
• Key conventions: A reflective, personal voice, vivid descriptions of real places and cultural experiences, thematic commentary, and chronological or reflective structure.
• Look out for: The balance between factual reporting and emotional, reflective insight.
Key Takeaway: Literary genres prioritize artistry, voice, imagery, and theme to evoke an emotional and intellectual reaction in the audience.
---3. Non-Literary Text Types: Informing, Persuading, and Directing
The MYP syllabus places equal value on non-literary texts. In an on-screen examination, you may be asked to analyse non-literary extracts alongside or in comparison to literary texts.
A. News Reports and Feature Articles
• News report conventions: Inverted pyramid structure (most important facts first: who, what, where, when, why), headline, lead paragraph, objective third-person register, factual vocabulary, quotations from witnesses or officials.
• Feature article conventions: Creative headline, narrative hook, background context, balance of facts and personal human-interest stories, more expressive and varied vocabulary.
B. Opinion Columns and Reviews
• Key conventions: Clear first-person or distinctive authorial voice, strong point of view, persuasive rhetorical devices, anecdotes, emotive language, and a provocative closing statement.
C. Speeches
• Key conventions: Spoken register designed for an auditory audience, direct address ("you", "we"), rhetorical questions, tricolon (groups of three), repetition (anaphora), contrasting pairs, and emotive appeals.
D. Digital and Multimodal Texts (Blogs, Websites, Social-Media Texts)
• Key conventions: Hyperlinks, concise paragraphs, conversational or semi-formal register, interactive calls to action, headings, tags, and integration of visual elements.
E. Informational Texts (Brochures, Public-Information Texts, Infographics)
• Key conventions: Clear typographic hierarchy (bold headers, bullet points, subheadings), concise and direct instructions (imperative verbs), visual icons, graphs, charts, and highly functional layout designed for quick scanning.
Key Takeaway: Non-literary texts rely on clear organisational structures and targeted registers to inform, persuade, or prompt an audience into action.
---4. Visual and Multimodal Conventions
The eAssessment frequently uses photographs, cartoons, posters, or advertisements as stimuli. When viewing a visual text, you must analyse its design choices just as you would analyse words in a passage.
• Layout and Composition: Where are objects placed? What sits in the foreground, midground, or background? What draws the eye first (the focal point)?
• Typography: Font style, weight (boldness), capitalisation, and size. Is the font modern and minimalist, or classical and ornate?
• Colour and Contrast: Warm vs. cool tones, light vs. shadow (chiaroscuro), high saturation vs. muted palettes, and what symbolic associations they carry.
• Juxtaposition: Placing two contrasting visual elements side by side to highlight a conflict, irony, or dramatic difference.
• Body Language and Gaze: In photographs or cartoons, where are figures looking? Direct address (looking at the viewer) creates an immediate connection; looking away suggests isolation, contemplation, or vulnerability.
Key Takeaway: Visual elements are creator choices. Never simply describe what is in the picture; explain why the creator framed it that way and how it affects the viewer.
---5. Comparing Conventions Across Genres (Criterion A iv)
In the on-screen examination Analysis task, you must compare and contrast two unseen extracts. Criterion A strand iv specifically tests your ability to evaluate similarities and differences by connecting features across and within genres and texts.
Step-by-Step Approach to Comparison
Step 1: Identify the text types. Ask yourself: Is Text 1 a poem and Text 2 a memoir? Or are both extracts fiction from different cultures or periods?
Step 2: Find the common anchor. Both texts will connect to a shared idea or issue (such as displacement, youth, justice, identity, or the natural world).
Step 3: Compare how conventions convey that idea. How does Text 1's genre handle the theme compared to Text 2's genre?
Example Analysis Framework:
• Text 1 (a speech on environmental survival) uses direct address, urgent rhetorical questions, and an assertive formal register to mobilize a crowd.
• Text 2 (a poem on the same environmental issue) explores survival through delicate natural imagery, irregular stanzas, and quiet personification to evoke grief and reflection.
Notice how both explore the same central issue, but their generic conventions shape entirely different emotional responses!
---6. Applying Conventions in Creative Writing (Criterion C & D)
In the Creative Writing task (400–600 words), you will be given an image stimulus and must choose from three prompts: an internal monologue, a narration of events, or a detailed description. Meeting Criterion C and Criterion D means rigorously adhering to the conventions of your chosen form!
Conventions of the Three Writing Prompts:
1. Internal Monologue:
• Voice: First-person ("I").
• Conventions: Stream of consciousness or private reflection; emotional shifts; rhetorical questioning of oneself; sentence fragments to mimic genuine human thought; sensory focus on the immediate scene.
2. Narrative of Events:
• Voice: First-person or third-person.
• Conventions: Plot progression, purposeful pacing (slowing down for tense moments, speeding up for action), character interactions, dialogue with accurate punctuation, and clear transitions between moments.
3. Description:
• Voice: Immersive narrator, often present-tense or reflective past-tense.
• Conventions: Rich sensory imagery (sight, sound, smell, texture), precise figurative devices (metaphor, personification), spatial organisation (moving from wide view to close-up detail), and varied sentence lengths to create mood.
7. Common Pitfalls to Avoid
• Feature spotting without analysis: Writing "The text uses a headline and bullet points" earns very few marks. You must explain the effect: "The creator uses bullet points to break down complex statistical information into accessible steps, ensuring the public absorbs the warning immediately."
• Ignoring layout in multimodal texts: Forgetting to comment on visual hierarchy, typography, or image-text relationships when analysing posters or websites.
• Inconsistent register in writing: Shifting from formal narrative prose into modern casual slang without a clear creative reason.
• Confusing the narrator with the creator: The creator is the author/artist; the narrator is the invented voice telling the story.
8. Quick Summary & Review
• Genre and text types provide standard conventions that shape how information and emotion are communicated.
• Literary texts rely on narrative perspective, dialogue, figurative language, rhythm, and structural tension.
• Non-literary texts use practical structures (headlines, columns, rhetorical patterns, typography) to inform and persuade.
• Visual texts convey meaning through framing, gaze, colour, contrast, and juxtaposition.
• In Analysis (Criterion A), evaluate how different generic conventions shape audience responses to a shared issue.
• In Creative Writing (Criterion C & D), deliberately select and maintain the exact stylistic and structural conventions of your chosen prompt.