In rhetoric, the theory of genre provides a means to classify and compare artifacts in terms of their formal, substantive and contextual features.
In the latest turn, critics have begun applying formalist and socio-cultural concepts to new-media artifacts that tend to resist classification into traditional genre-categories.
Bakhtin continues to explain that there are three factors of the whole utterance which include semantic exhaustiveness of the theme, the speaker's plan or speech will, and the typical compositional and generic forms of finalization.
As Bahktin writes, "These genres are so diverse because they differ depending on the situation, social position, and personal interrelations of the participants in the communication".
Rhetoric of the forensic genre questions guilt or innocence, is concerned with legalities, and concentrates on events that occurred in the past.
As a result of the institutions that execute the U.S. Constitution, every four years at the time of presidential elections, candidates deliver campaign speeches.
Campaign speeches have become a distinct genre because they respond to highly similar situations that recur because of a structural or institutional basis.
[6] According to Campbell and Jamieson, “when a generic claim is made, the critical situation alters significantly because the critic is now arguing that a group of discourses has a synthetic core in which certain significant rhetorical elements, e.g., a system of belief, lines of argument, stylistic choices, and the perception of the situation, are fused into an indivisible whole".
[8] This concept can be explained through an example of a generic hybrid of deliberative and epideictic elements, in which a newly elected president delivers an inaugural address.
The President is speaking at a formal ceremony recognizing the current state of the nation (characteristic of the epideictic genre), while simultaneously announcing his policy plans for the upcoming four years.
In their analysis, Miller and Shepherd examine the extent to which the weblog might constitute a genre in light of its interaction with current social and cultural trends.
Recently scholars and researchers in rhetoric, linguistics, and information sciences have begun to explore the relationships between new media and socio-contextual genre theories (like those of Carolyn Miller, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Charles Bazerman).