John Swales' Theory

 

John Swales is a British linguist who is best known for his theory on genre classification. Swales has analysed the word 'genre', taken from the French and Latin word for 'Kind' or 'Class' and used it to accumulate a theory about genre. His theory explains that if there are similarities between texts and conventions, this means that they are of the same 'genre', and has described these similarities as 'family resemblances'.