Genres of Digital Documents

Book excerpt: The study of genres the fusion of content, purpose and form of communicative actions stretches back hundreds of years to the beginnings of self-reflective human communication. Greek philosophers and orators recognized that the content of the message is not always its most important aspect; rather, the delivery, the context, and the rhetorical structure all play complementary roles in the subtle but profound act of one human being transferring information to another and thereby creating meaning from that transfer.