Q 1. As Devitt explains how understanding genres can help to learn and to revise writing, ENC 2135 is highly invested in genres. What do you think about the benefit of learning, for example, a research paper emphasized as a genre rather than just learning how to write it?
Q 2. According to Dirk, genre enables a more effective communication, and readers can get easily confused if the writing deviates from it too much. But we don’t want to lose our idiosyncrasy within the similarities either. How do you think writers can balance within and without genre convention?
I think it is helpful for students to learn the research paper as a genre so that they can see it as a certain kind of writing with certain conventions that may have some universalities but then will also may diverge when students get into the various fields of study. A literature or history paper will still follow some of the general conventions of a research paper but may also converge. A research paper for a chemistry or microbiology class may be very different.
ReplyDeleteRegarding your second question, I think it's all about determining what exactly the important parts of a "genre" are. Dirk highlights how the purpose, audience, expected reader, etc. all work together to determine the genre--that's it's not defined entirely by form.
ReplyDeleteI think that changing up the form and style while still maintaining the same goals and rhetorical ideas will probably produced something that stays within the genre while avoiding boring repetition. If you stray far enough outside of the genre that it confuses readers and the principles of effective rhetoric are being ignored, then you probably have strayed outside of the genre anyway.