First Take: In general usage, a “convention” is a custom that has been handed down by cultural practice, over time:  for instance, how to dress at a funeral, start a letter (“Dear X,”), or answer a telephone. In narrative, a convention is, likewise, a feature of a text’s form, style or content which has been established by earlier literary forms.

Deeper: Conventions apply sometimes to the point where they come to be generally expected by the reader, and thus repeated, even unconsciously, by writers. For instance, unless they are told otherwise, an audience watching a play will typically assume that the space of a stage is a representation of a real-world place or space (until something tells them it is not). That’s a theatrical convention–in fact, in a way relevant to Chapter 3’s discussion, a convention of  “realism” in drama. Sometimes literary conventions are a matter of form, too–a sonnet will typically have fourteen lines, for instance—and sometimes of content (a western will commonly have a sidekick, a melodrama a series of cliffhangers).  Add up a group of such conventions, and you typically arrive at a genre or a mode (see also the discussion in Chapter 4 ).
          Many writers of narrative journalism, of course, resist the idea that their story-forms are bound by conventions at all. Rather, the empiricist assumptions often governing their practice reinforce the idea that the story-form is virtually equivalent to what is witnessed, and therefore always unique. As a result, the often-pejorative connotations of the term—“conventional” sometimes implying “un-original” or stereotypical thinking or writing–generally resonate even more strongly among journalists than others. Nevertheless, the reliance of the profession on time-honored internalized rituals, recognized methods of independent verification, and carefully stipulated rhetorical devices means that the influence of conventions is, for all practical purposes, nearly unavoidable.