The structure an author gives a text is its form (L. forma, “shape, configuration”), in contrast to the text’s content (L com “together” + tenere “to hold”), which is the specific information held together by the form of the text.
As the literary critic Cleanth Brooks famously insists, “form is meaning,” making the way an author structures content as important as the actual content itself. In a rhetorical analysis, form is content; that is, the author’s form is the content of our criticism; or, the way the author chooses to structure his or her text is a key part of what we want to examine when we interpret the author’s intent. What form does a text take, we ask, and how does that form play a part in the rhetorical effect on the audience? Such questions about the form of a text tend to separate into the question of medium and the question of genre.
The critic Marshall McLuhan spins “form is meaning” to say “the medium is the message.” Again our critical attention shifts from the idea a text is supposed to communicate to the means of that text’s communication. The medium (L. medius, “middle”) of a text is the material vehicle that stores and transmits information, or the thing that exists in the middle space between rhetor and reader. Books, artworks, recordings, and the internet are all different media, different platforms for an author to communicate with an audience. The Harry Potter books and the Harry Potter films exist in two different media; it’s not the same story told in two different ways, but two different stories because the medium is the message.
Once you’ve determined the medium for an act of communication, the next step is to identify its genre(s). Related to the Greek word for family, a genre (Gk. genos, “to produce”) is a clear resemblance present in a distinct group of texts. In biological taxonomy, a lion and a tiger are different species, but they share enough attributes to belong to the same genus, panthera, though these big cats clearly differ from the small cats in the genus felis. Rhetorical genres work the same way. Two action films, say Die Hard and The Bourne Identity, are similar enough to share a genre, and the action genre is clearly different from the comedy genre that produces a film such as The Hangover. Like the biologist, the rhetorical analyst must be able to recognize similarities in the texts within a genre, and differences between one genre and another. There’s even a name for this way of grouping texts together, and just as importantly thinking about the texts that don’t fit cleanly into one group, even has a name: “genre theory.”
Whenever a reader recognizes the medium and genre of a text, he or she creates expectations, because texts of the same form often share many of the same features. When you listen to KROQ on the radio, you expect to hear music, specifically alternative rock. Should you hear jazz, or worse a detailed report on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, you would feel betrayed.
The medium and genre of choice always carry certain conventions (L. con- “together” + venere, “to come”), or standard patterns of procedure that enjoy general agreement or consent among a group. Patterns indicate authorial intent. Rhetors manage the meaning of their texts by using conventional forms that are understood to produce certain effects on an audience. If an earlier text produced a response from its audience that I want to produce, I imitate the way that text works in my own. If I want a different response from my audience, I imitate a different text, or I change something about the way the earlier text works.
Thus the rhetorical tradition operates through imitation and innovation, what we might call repetition and transgression. Repetition (re, “again” + petere, “to demand”) is demanding and doing again that which has already been done; transgression (L. trans, “across” + gradi, “to step”) is stepping away from and not doing that which was done.
An author selects this medium or that genre precisely because the conventions of a rhetorical form create certain expectations. When an audience generates expectations because they are familiar with a given form, and an author repeats the routine procedure of that form, expectation is fulfilled, and the audience feels safe and warm, confident they understand the text. If an author transgresses the conventions of that form, however, the audience falls into confusion, wondering why the normal movement was not carried to completion. Here is where serious rhetorical analysis begins, and it continues by identifying specific devices or strategies in the text that create a connection with the audience and convince the audience to feel, think, act or respond in a certain way.
When you read a text critically, analyze the ways it repeats and transgresses the conventions of a medium or genre. When a text follows generic conventions purely, ask how the author uses that genre to accomplish his or her goal. When a generic text swerves from convention, ask why the author uses difference to control the meaning of a text and the response of an audience. It is always interesting, finally, when a genre associated with one medium appears in a different medium: do the conventions of the genre survive this innovation? Like most categories critics construct, medium and genre are leaky containers, apt to spill.