Which term best describes the study of categorising discourse types such as obituaries, abstracts and menus by their purpose and structure?

• A. Genre analysis
• B. Genre
• C. Formal schemata
• D. Global revision

Answer: (A)

Genre analysis focuses on how texts are grouped by their communicative purpose and their conventional structure. When you categorize obituaries, abstracts, and menus, you’re examining the common aims of each text type and the typical organization they follow—the moves, sections, and language patterns that signal their function. The term for the category itself is “genre,” but the study of these categories and how they’re used in context is genre analysis. Concepts like formal schemata refer to readers’ knowledge about expected content, not the act of classifying text types, and global revision is about broad edits, not classification. So the best description for this study is genre analysis.