Rupert Taylor concluded that political prophecy was a literary genre, in which texts were constructed using a specially-developed language, known to initiates. The texts, therefore, resembled coded messages, which could then be deciphered by those who knew how they had been encoded. Most medieval political prophecies, however, were not hard for educated contemporaries to understand; the intention was that the message should be clear, not that it should be enveloped in a thick fog impenetrable to all but the few. If this were so, political prophecy would not have survived in such large quantities, and would not feature so prominently in hugely popular and widely circulated works such as the Brut. Political prophecy is treated with deadly seriousness by the chroniclers who use it. It cannot, therefore, be reduced to the status of an intellectual game. In other words, it is time to re-classify political prophecy.

Prophecy is not a genre, but a discourse. Much work has been done on the subject of discourse since the 1960s, particularly by French and American scholars, a summary of which was made available by Diane Macdonell in her book, Theories of Discourse. Important analyses of discourse can also be found in the work of Lodge and Kress, Copley and Barrell. Discourse is a particular range of language, which provides a specific and exclusive way of talking about and viewing a subject, or subjects: