A Genre System View of the Funding of Academic Research

TLDR

Grant proposals are a high‑stakes genre embedded within a complex network of interrelated genres that together form a genre system. The article investigates the nature, roles, and functions of the academic research funding genre system and how its study informs writers’ genre knowledge. The study finds that grant writing is a social activity, that intertextual networks guide writers and build their knowledge of the system, and that system‑level knowledge differs from isolated‑genre knowledge.

Abstract

For many researchers, grant proposals are a high-stakes genre crucial to their work; this pivotal genre does not exist in isolation but as part of a complex reticulation of genres that interact to form a genre system. This article explores the genre system of academic research funding in terms of the following questions: (a) What is the nature of the genre system of grant funding? (b) What are the roles and functions of that system? and (c) What does exploration of the system reveal about genre knowledge and how writers develop such knowledge? Findings suggest that grant writing is fundamentally a social activity, that the intertextual networks of the genre system serve to navigate writers through that system and to build the writers’ knowledge of the system, and that knowledge of a genre system may differ in important ways from knowledge of an isolated genre.