2. Genres of Environmental Communication

This chapter delves into the various genres of environmental communication, highlighting their unique qualities and expectations. It begins by exploring online spaces, which include blogs, social media, podcasts, videos, and databases, and their nonlinear, modular, multimodal, interactive, and proximity-to-audiences characteristics. The chapter then examines journalism, focusing on its brevity, inverted pyramid structure, objectivity, timeliness, and editorial roles. Reports are also discussed, emphasizing their objective tone, technical jargon, limited audiences, organized structures, record-keeping nature, and time-consuming, costly, and proprietary aspects. Essays are analyzed, with a focus on persuasive or argumentative, compare and contrast, expository, and definition or description essays. Lastly, the chapter looks at books, highlighting their focus and length, limited modalities, time-intensive nature, publishers and self-publishing aspects, and cost. Throughout the chapter, practical exercises and examples are provided to illustrate the unique characteristics of each genre and to help readers understand how to effectively use them in their environmental communication efforts.