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Navigating Genres

Meghan Hawk
Navigating Genres


Throughout "Navigating Genres" by Kerry Dirk, she explores genre conventions and what it means to adhere to a specific genre, both benefiting and complicating. Dirk personally addresses her concrete audience: college students. By establishing who the readers are, she takes on a conversational tone and even states that she is acting more of a coach, rather than from a third person or impersonal standpoint. This in itself forms its own genre. Collectively as college students we now know what to expect from Dirk--that she is attempting to generate a new response to our take on how we perceive genre. Dirk makes note of "everyday genres" in headlines, which is something in my experience I have not considered to be a genre. However, after reading how The Onion uses it's comedic one-liners to grab their audience and make them laugh, I can see how she came to the realization that these too can be considered genre. Something else that I felt I related to was the general thesis statement and the "rules" that come along with writing them. High school was filled with numerous papers with mandatory theses that felt like a formula. Writing according these algorithms doesn't allow for variation in structure and in truth feels quite constricting. Dirk admits that these often lead her to "very bad writing", and of course, I don't blame her.

Comments

  1. UnknownJanuary 17, 2018 at 10:42 AM

    I can relate very much to your statement about the general thesis statement and the rules that follow them because we were taught all through elementary school to high school to use them. After writing those required essay I found myself never being proud of them because I wasn't able to write how I truly wanted to.

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  2. Annie WhiddonJanuary 17, 2018 at 12:05 PM

    I liked the fact that Dirk's writing was so conversational, like you said, and it is a genre in itself. I also had never thought of everyday genres before this reading, and it just shows how vast the concept of genre is.

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  3. UnknownJanuary 17, 2018 at 3:14 PM

    I like how you pointed out that Dirk was speaking to college students and therefore changed her rhetoric. And I agree with what you said about the "formula" of writing and that it leads to poor writing.

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  4. UnknownJanuary 17, 2018 at 8:45 PM

    I agree about the rules and formulas that high school had us follow when we write, and how that doesn't always help papers, but sometimes makes them worse due to the restrictions. I also liked her example of The Onion!

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