Thlog 4: Genres Are Cool!

After doing the group activity on Wednesday, I reflected on how important and useful it is to understand genres and how they are formed. After the groups were all given random genres to write about using the same topic, we were all able to nail It, even if it wasn’t a genre that we had much experience with. Because we had taken the time to identify the audience, understand the purpose of the writing, and analyze other conventions of our given genre, we were able to successfully create a work of that genre from a simple prompt. I then considered how understanding how to apply genres can be extremely useful in every day life. Throughout my life, I will have to write countless things for many different occasions, and will have to know how to use language to my advantage. For example, I could need to write a letter to my landlord about fixing a problem in my house, or an email to my coworkers about cleaning up after themselves in the employee lounge. That being said, knowing how to navigate through genres will better help me achieve my goals in writing and use the most fitting language for the situation I am in. No matter the scenario, it is important to understand the expectations that come with writing certain genres and be able to apply rhetoric in a way that will elicit a desired response. 

Thlog 3: Audience and Peer Reviewing

After finishing up my first writing project, I reflected on my work and tried to think of the most important thing I had learned from it. I finally concluded that the single biggest thing I took away from this project was how much audience influences a genre. Between all three of my pasta recipes, most of the variation was because of the different audiences. The audiences had an impact on how the recipe was formatted, worded, etc. As Losh and Alexander said, everything you write is “influenced by what you know about the audience’s expectations” (7). Audience is crucial to writing a genre because certain rhetorical strategies work better with specific groups of people. Understanding who you’re writing to and their expectations can better help you achieve your goals because you can write in a way that you know will elicit a desired response.

Besides learning about audience, I gained valuable knowledge on how to peer review an essay. The reading “Responding to Other Student’s Writing” by Richard Straub really helped me because in the past I have been overly critical when grading other student’s essays and not given enough support or positive feedback. The reading told me not to sound like a “teacher” or “judge” (19). I really let those words sink in and resonate through my mind when we did the peer editing in class. I tried to ask questions and be positive but also offer advice. I gave reasoning for everything that I wrote so that the actual concept would make sense to the reader and he could understand why it should be fixed. Responding to my classmate’s essays also gave me a better understanding of what we were learning and gave me some ideas about what I could fix on my own paper.

Thlog 2: Understanding Rhetorical Context

After reading “Backpacks to Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis,” I felt that I had a much better understanding of genres. In the beginning of reading, Carroll compared a rhetorical analysis to the way we draw on our mental database to “make conclusions about what a person’s looks tell you about their personality” (Carroll 46). We are able to identify a genre by quickly analyzing a work’s conventions. Getting good at identifying genres in readings, movies, etc. could help us when making “savvy judgments” (Carroll 46) in situations we encounter in real life. Carroll’s article also provided me with useful information about exigence, audience, and constraints – the keys to understanding the context of a rhetorical situation. Exigence is the “circumstance or condition that invites a response” (Carroll 48). In other words, you can think of exigence as the cause of a response, or why you’re writing in the first place. The audience is the people what will be viewing your work, intentionally or not. It is important to make your audience people that “should be able to help address the problem” (Carroll 49). You wouldn’t write a letter complaining about a restaurant worker to your cousin, but instead to maybe the manager of the facility, or customer service. In addition, identifying the audience that you are addressing is key in choosing the best type of language to use for your argument. Then there are constraints. Constraints are like the limitations of a genre; they could be a word limit on an essay or how formal you must be when writing to one of your professors. Although not mentioned in Carroll’s article, there are also allowances, which are essentially the opposites of constraints. Allowances are like things you can get away with in writing due to the situation, such as how casual you can be when writing to an immediate family member. Being able to understand exigence, the audience, constraints, and allowances is an important factor in being able to identify and analyze genre and can help you immensely.