Writing in Credo: Forms and Genres

The visible recording of language peculiar to the human species. Writing enables the transmission of ideas over vast distances of time and space and is a prerequisite of complex civilization. Where, and by whom writing was first developed remains unknown, but scholars place the beginning of writing at 6,000 B.C.

Words set apart in some way from ordinary everyday communication. In the ancient oral traditions, before stories and poems were written down, literature had a mainly public function - mythic and religious.

The interpretation and evaluation of literature and the arts. It exists in a variety of literary forms: dialogues (Plato, John Dryden), verse (Horace, Alexander Pope), letters (John Keats), essays (Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden), and treatises (Philip Sydney, Percy Bysshe Shelley).

Assessment and interpretation of literary works. The term ‘criticism’ is often taken to mean exclusively adverse comment, but in fact it refers to all literary assessment, whether positive or negative.

In modern literary usage, a sustained work of prose fiction a volume or more in length. It is distinguished from the short story and the fictional sketch, which are necessarily brief. The novel became the dominant form of Western literature in the 19th cent., which produced many works that are considered milestones in the development of the form.

Genre of fictional prose narrative set in the past. A novel with a period in history as its setting, which includes historical events and characters.

Short work of prose fiction, usually consisting of between 500 and 10,000 words, which typically either sets up and resolves a single narrative point or depicts a mood or an atmosphere. The form has a long history and examples of its popularity and success include Aesop's Fables and the tales of The Thousand and One Nights.

In literature, tales of love and chivalric adventure, in verse or prose, that became popular in France about 1200 and spread throughout Europe. It had antecedents in many works from classical antiquity, but developed as a distinctive genre in the context of the aristocratic court.

Or mystery story, literary genre in which the cause (or causes) of a mysterious happening, often a crime, is gradually revealed by the hero or heroine; this is accomplished through a mixture of intelligence, ingenuity, the logical interpretation of evidence, and sometimes sheer luck.

Genre of novel or short story in which a mystery is solved mainly by the action of a professional or amateur detective. Where the mystery to be solved concerns a crime, the work may be called crime fiction.

Genre in which a background of science or pseudoscience is an integral part of the story. Science fiction is the literature of the scientific age. Born in adventure pulp magazines during the first half of the twentieth century, the science fiction genre began to mature in the 1940s and 1950s.

Imaginative literary form, particularly suitable for describing emotions and thoughts. Poetry is highly ‘compressed’ writing, often using figures of speech to talk about one thing in terms of another, such as metaphor and simile, that allows the reader to ‘unpack’ the poem's meaning for itself.

Or rime, the most prominent of the literary artifices used in versification. Although it was used in ancient East Asian poetry, rhyme was practically unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

A short poem with 14 lines of 10 or 11 syllables each and a regular rhyming pattern according to the scheme: the Italian sonnet consists of an octave and a sestet, whereas the English sonnet consists of three quatrains and ends with a rhyming couplet. Introduced to England by English poet Thomas Wyatt in the form used by Italian poet Petrarch and followed by English poets John Milton and William Wordsworth; English playwright and poet William Shakespeare wrote 14-line sonnets consisting of three groups of four lines (quatrains) and two final rhyming lines (a couplet), following the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg.

In music, the anonymous folk ballad (or popular ballad), was composed to be sung. It was passed along orally from singer to singer, from generation to generation, and from one region to another. In literature, short, narrative poem usually relating a single, dramatic event. Two forms of the ballad are often distinguished—the folk ballad, dating from about the 12th century, and the literary ballad, dating from the late 18th century.

Principles of metrical practice in poetry. In different literatures poetic form is achieved in various ways; usually, however, a definite and predictable pattern is evident in the language.

[Gr.,=measure of five], in prosody, a line to be scanned in five feet (see versification). The third line of Thomas Nashe's "Spring" is in pentameter: "Cold doth / not sting, / the pret / ty birds / do sing." Iambic pentameter, in which each foot contains an unaccented syllable and an accented syllable, is the most common English meter.

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
In poetry, the rhythmic pattern of a poetic line. Various principles have been devised to organize poetic lines into rhythmic units. Quantitative verse, the metre of Classical Greek and Latin poetry, measures the length of time required to pronounce syllables, regardless of their stress; combinations of long and short syllables form the basic rhythmic units. Syllabic verse is most common in languages that are not strongly accented, such as French or Japanese; it is based on a fixed number of syllables within a line. Accentual verse occurs in strongly stressed languages, such as the Germanic; only stressed syllables within a line are counted. Accentual-syllabic verse is the usual form in English poetry; it combines syllable counting and stress counting. The most common English metre, iambic pentameter, is a line of 10 syllables, or 5 iambic feet; each foot contains an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

A syllable is a sound unit produced by a single impulse from the voice. It must include a core, or nucleus. The core is an uninterrupted phonetic segment, such as “ah” and “oh,” formed by a vowel, diphthong, or syllabic consonant.

Short piece of non-fiction writing, often dealing with a particular subject from a personal point of view. The essay became a recognized form with the publication of Essais (1580) by French writer Montaigne and Essays (1597) by English politician, philosopher, and writer Francis Bacon.

The collection and periodic publication or transmission of news through media such as newspaper, periodical, television, and radio.

Reconstruction in print or on film, of the lives of real men and women. Together with autobiography—an individual's interpretation of his own life—it shares a venerable tradition, meeting the demands of different audiences through the ages.

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Biography of oneself narrated by oneself. Little autobiographical literature exists from antiquity and the Middle Ages; with a handful of exceptions, the form begins to appear only in the 15th century. Autobiographical works take many forms, from intimate writings made during life that are not necessarily intended for publication (including letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, and reminiscences) to the formal autobiography.

From The Dictionary of Human Geography
A genre of prose about the experience of being away from home.