Pickens 7/19

1 – In Navigating Genres Kerry Dirk says that because “genres function as social actions, you can quite accurately predict how they function rhetorically”, suggesting that your genre choice when writing is largely determined by the social function of your writing instead of (or along with) your writing’s content (253). Do you think that social function and a writing’s content are repeatable? Do you think they impact a text’s genre equally or is one more important than the other?

1 – One of Amy Devitt’s main points in Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept is that we have too long conceived of genre as forms of writing and that we need to start understanding genre as “a dynamic response to and construction of recurring situation[s]…that [adapt] and [grow] as the social context changes” (580). Do you think that it is possible for a genre to exist outside of social conditions? How would you go about teaching definitions of genre to your students using Devitt’s concept?