Final answer:
The word 'genres' refers to different kinds of writing including jokes, recipes, blog posts, and poems, and applies broadly across different formats and styles, having their own unique conventions.
Step-by-step explanation:
The word genres refers to different kinds (or styles) of writing such as jokes, academic papers, recipes, blog posts, and poems. Over time, people have developed specific ways of writing for particular rhetorical situations. The term genre can refer to any type of writing that adheres to specific forms and benchmarks. This includes narrative stories, which are essential to many genres of writing, as humans across all cultures engage in storytelling, as both storytellers and audience members.
Genres as a means of categorization span works of literature and can be seen in publishing categories such as novels or memoirs, but also encompass a broad array of writing types. Works of creative nonfiction, such as personal narratives and memoirs, belong to genres that share traits with fiction writing but are based on real-life events and characters.
In addition to literature, genres apply to a wide range of writing styles and formats across various mediums, including text and digital compositions. Each genre possesses its own conventions, which create expectations for both the creators and the audience. Therefore, when writing or analyzing texts, recognizing these conventions is crucial for understanding how the content is communicated and received.