1. Dirk makes a case for genre conventions as being helpful for making more "efficient decisions when writing" and facilitating the process of composition. He states that "it it risky to choose not to follow such conventions." On what sort of basis would you deem it acceptable, even necessary perhaps, to break the recognized conventions of the genre you are working in, and what would the end result of that be?
2. Do you agree with Devitt's argument that form and content cannot realistically be divorced from one another? It seems to make sense that genre conventions necessarily influence the content of a composition, but to what degree does this account for writers that have an idea prior to deciding on a genre? Does the situation I've established even exist?
Hi Michael,
ReplyDeleteI think the conversations we've been having in class about standard academic English really connect to your first question. The conventions of many "academic" genres, the research paper for example, call for the standard, logocentric, style prioritized as "intellectual speak" at academic institutions. We are at a point in composition studies where we can recognize the biases and prejudices of these conventions, but have not yet ventured into breaking the rules in any meaningful way. In order to make academic institutions more inclusive, and just generally more rounded, it is necessary to break the rules of certain genre conventions. On another note, breaking genre conventions can also inspire a more creative writing mindset for students. If students are encouraged to experiment, we may be surprised by the level of invention and ingenuity in their work. Multimodal projects are a great example of defying conventions of academic writing in order to produce thoughtful, critically aware work.
Hi Michael,
ReplyDeleteI am not sure if we can completely divorce form from content in the sense that we can easily trace the way that form and content influence each other (something I think neither side of the equation can escape) But I think we can examine each of those things separately - as they are discrete parts of the writing after it has been finished. In the situation where a writer conceives of the majority of their content before deciding on a genre (or naturally coming to one) I would have to say that the act of writing that concept into that genre would inherently change that concept, even if only slightly. We can think of content and form interacting dialectically, continually influencing each other with the genre of the piece being part of the results of those processes.