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I am looking for the correct preposition to use in a sentence I am including in my short bio.

The sentence goes like this:

"My other hobbies include cycling, hiking, cooking and watching movies ___ sci-fi genre."

Similarly for "[...] reading books ___ sci-fi genre."

Which preposition would best fit in the above two sentences (does it depend on action i.e. reading/watching)? I have a hunch that it should be either 'on' or 'of'.

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    Why not just "watching sci-fi movies"?
    – The Photon
    Commented Mar 29, 2020 at 23:01
  • @ThePhoton I would like to use the word 'genre' in the sentence
    – saz521
    Commented Mar 29, 2020 at 23:06
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    From is fine. Of can work. In can work but not here. With means the genre is sitting next to you, the two of you watching together a movie whose category is unspecified. On can mean that you're sitting not next to the genre but atop of it, or (more likely) that the movie you're watching is a documentary about the genre. Whose genre, then, is not the genre but "documentary".
    – ЯegDwight
    Commented Mar 30, 2020 at 0:01
  • I would say of (if I had to use genre - I would rather say "scifi books"). As RegDwight says, on implies documentary. I have not heard from used, but wouldn't say it's wrong. However, I think you need to use "the" for all of them: "books/movies of the sci-fi genre"
    – michael
    Commented Apr 29, 2020 at 17:51
  • cycling, cooking, hiking and movie watching
    – Lambie
    Commented Mar 3, 2021 at 21:49

2 Answers 2

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The correct obvious way to say this is "... watching sci-fi movies".

It is possible to say "... watching movies from the sci-fi genre", or perhaps "...in the sci-fi genre", but there is no reason to structure your phrase like this. ("on" would mean watching documentaries about sci-fi movies)

Don't force your grammar to use a particular word. That is "putting the cart before the horse".

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  • In a more cerebral movie, Moon outshines other movies in the sci-fi genre... source The examples I can find of "from the sci-fi genre" are almost all user comments and blog posts (as opposed to edited articles from the press). Not saying "from" isn't possible, but "in" might be preferred. We could also say "sci-fi genre movies" if we really wanted to use genre.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Apr 29, 2020 at 17:57
  • But you aren't watching the movie in the genre. So the movie is in the genre but in this particular collocation "from" is preferred (I feel, but "in" would communicate perfectly well, so I've added it back).But this is sort of the point - don't use the word genre at all.
    – James K
    Commented Apr 29, 2020 at 18:05
  • I had trouble finding any strong evidence one way or the other from the free resources I have access to - NGrams was a bust because getting really specific led to no results and being less specific resulted in mostly irrelevant (based on context) results. I probably would use "from" in that exact sentence, although I would never express it that way. I would say something like "I like sci-fi movies, especially those in the hard-science subgenre."
    – ColleenV
    Commented Apr 29, 2020 at 18:55
  • sci-fie moving watching, to go with the gerunds....
    – Lambie
    Commented Mar 3, 2021 at 21:50
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movies in the sci-fi genre.

Categories such as genres are logical containers, and we use “in” with containers, whether they are physical or logical.

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