Final answer:
The prescriptive approach to genres focuses on conventions and rules, while the descriptive approach looks at how genres are actually used and understood. An example is personal narratives and memoirs, which can be analyzed from both approaches.
Step-by-step explanation:
The prescriptive and descriptive approaches to genres are two different ways of understanding and analyzing genres in literature. The prescriptive approach focuses on how genres should be, based on conventions and rules set by society or experts.
It provides guidelines and expectations for how a particular genre should be structured and what elements it should contain. On the other hand, the descriptive approach looks at genres as they are actually used and understood by people. It examines how genres are shaped by cultural and social factors, and how they may vary and evolve over time.
For example, in the case of personal narratives and memoirs, the prescriptive approach might say that a personal narrative should have a specific structure and use certain narrative techniques, while the descriptive approach would analyze how personal narratives and memoirs are actually written and read by different authors and audiences, and how they may vary in terms of style, content, and format.