2: Genre

 Even though the length of the reading and the reading’s sophisticated diction originally put me off, reading what Devitt had to say about genres had me like :

I've always thought of the word genre as different categories to sort things like movies, music, and literature, and never more than that surface level meaning of the word. I’ve never considered it in the depth that Devitt goes into it, or even thought that genre had an effect or purpose beyond giving the intended audience a way to choose what they are going to process. Devitt’s definition of genre is that they are "social and rhetorical actions: they develop their languages and forms out of rhetorical aims and contexts shared by groups of users" (342); to me, this means that genre is a way to connect groups of people who are involved within that genre. This goes hand in hand "existing power structures and dynamics” (347) of genre.

I consider texting, emailing, and my academic writing as the different genres I encounter in day to day life. Texting, like with many other, is the one I most commonly use. When texting, the amount of emojis, slang/proper wording, ALL CAPS, and keyboard smashing I use depends on who I’m talking to and what we’re talking about. I text my sister very differently from the way I text my friends and parents and the people that I babysit for. When I email someone, I usually am much more formal than in a text, as when emailing I usually contact professors and potential employers, and so I have to be a lot more formal in my writing than if I was just going to text someone. In my academic writing, my writing is probably going to be much more structured - unless its for this blog, which is a more informal genre anyway - than a short email or text. I’m also going to put much more thought and time into writing academically than I would when sending rapid texts and short emails. In a way, this is an example of how writers take up the ideology of their genre. As the genre changes the way I approach the genre also changes, be it texting, emailing, or academic writing.

One form of writing that Devitt criticizes is “explicit genre teaching,” as she states that this limits genre and that there are better forms of teaching genre that do not limit the writer to a set structure. One form/example of this that I can really relate to my life is the five-paragraph essay. From elementary school onward the five paragraph essay was the holy grail of getting that A; to master it meant to have an advantage when teachers graded. I had a 10th grade English teacher grade essays entirely on the structure of the five paragraph essay, complete with a checklist for each paragraph - the actual content of the essay was only the deciding factor between an A- and an A+. I do think that the formulaic structure of that writing form introduced and advocated from an early age affected me as a writer, and it limited my freedom in writing, thus making me dread writing essays, but also diminished my will to really grow as a writer, as I just wanted to get the essay over with. Even beyond essays were the creative writing assignments with word count limits, supposedly “free-written” journals that had to have specific vocabulary words in order to be marked as passing, and even science lab reports that were limited to a certain number of pages. Because of explicit genre teaching, people are limited in their creativity. Devitt fears that this way of teaching will cause everyone to write very similarly to each other, and that critical genre awareness becomes limited as well.

For the most part I agreed with Devitt’s points. And after reading her work, I am going to put more thought and consideration into importance of genre and what it means in my life and society.