16. Writing is Made of Genres, and Genres are Made of ROCSS (Part II)

In this second episode on a series about ROCSS, I use a page from the Merriam-Webster Children's Dictionary on my son's bookshelf to talk through the components of the acronym: Recurring Occasion, Content, Structure, and Style. ROCSS offers a powerful and memorable way to describe genres in the classroom, and varied practice with what I call a "ROCSS Analysis"--a brief genre analysis--can help learners understand writing in terms of genre. This episode uses the dictionary entry to describe how ROCSS works, and future episodes will provide further examples of how I use it with my students, how I came up with ROCSS in the first place, and the theories of genre that inform my use of ROCSS.