PB1B: Ravioli, Ravioli, Give Me The Formuoli

            Although there is no explicit list of rules for a genre, there are general conventions that can serve as guidelines when writing. A convention is something that is common amongst almost all works of that genre. The “genre generator” websites are able to create works of a certain genre using those conventions. Despite the fact that most of the works generated were nonsense, they all contained similar patterns that are distinguishable by genre.

            The Computer Science research paper generator had the most visible conventions. I immediately noticed that all of the papers generated followed the exact same format, just using different words and figures. The purpose of these computer science papers seemed to be to make an organized report of a study/experiment. They all began with a scientific-sounding title followed by the author(s)’s name(s), which seemed to add some credibility to the report. The papers were organized into little sections with a heading clearly indicating what that part was about. Following the introduction, they all had sections discussing related work, describing the design of the study, explaining how the design is actually implemented, and evaluating the results. Then, the papers closed with a conclusion followed by an organized list of references that were cited throughout the paper. The papers also included various kinds of graphs and models labeled as “Figure 1” and such. Although the actual content of these papers are not real, their tone is professional and informative. The complex nature of the writing makes it seem like the author actually knows what they're talking about. The extravagant word choice and clear structure makes the papers seem credible and legitimate, despite the fact that what’s written is hoopla.

            Conventions do not just pertain to essays or written works. Just as a computer science research paper contains certain conventions, comics possess typical features as well. On the Pandyland website, a comic is generated by simply putting together three random pictures that each seem like part of a comic, but don’t actually fit together. A very obvious and well known convention of a comic are the boxed drawings which separate the scenes. Comics typically have funny, colorful pictures which aim to entertain the reader and/or evoke laughter. The characters depicted in the comic are cartoon-like, and are shown with strong facial expressions. The characters’ dialogue/thoughts are presented as “word bubbles” coming out of their mouth. Comics are typically characterized by short and humorous sayings.

            Another genre with visual conventions are Memes. Memes have been consistently growing in popularity and are found all over social media websites such as Facebook or Tumblr. Memes are distinguished by a picture of a well known character/person and a witty, humorous, short caption relating to it. For example, a meme of Obama features his picture with a caption sarcastically commenting on something he’s done. In addition, there are recurring characters in memes that are always captioned a certain way, such as “Bad Luck Brian,” which is a picture of a nerdy boy captioned with various, funny misfortunes. The beginning of the joke is typically put above the character and the actual punchline is almost always below, prompting the joke to be read as two parts. The jokes within memes are typically satirical or making fun of someone. Memes are all characterized by the same bold, white font with a black outline so that the writing is clear and prominent.

            The fourth genre generator I looked at was an “Adolescent Poetry” generator from elsewhere.org. The creator of this generator used poems from his company’s website that “published” children’s works to identify the common elements of all of the poems. The poems are formulated based on the probabilities of words following each other. The poems all began with a simple title with the author’s name on the line underneath. The entire poem was not capitalized, which ties to the fact that adolescents are not yet professional writers. The actual length of the poem is long, but each line of the poem typically only has about four to five words. The poem sounds emotional and “deep,” even though it doesn’t actually say anything meaningful. This generator was truly spot on. It sounds like every poem I attempted to write in my angsty middle school days.

            The websites can help someone better understand genre because despite the fact that each work generated had different content, they all followed a certain structure for the genre by using its conventions. Even if one is writing in a genre that one has never done before, looking at other works of that same genre can help identify the expectations for that genre and therefore provide guidelines. Genres follow conventions because those "rules" are known to elicit a certain response, such as the Computer Science research papers looking professional and credible because of their fancy prose and organized structure. To sum it up, what I took away from this assignment is that if you are able to identify the conventions of it, it will be easier to create something from a certain genre as you have identified a "formula" to follow.