Genres and their Situations
We all know what a genre is, right? A category. Like a horror movie, or an RPG video game. But they’re more than just a thing — writers pick genres to serve specific rhetorical purposes. And in this unit, we’ll be looking at a lot of things you might not think of as genres, analyzing them, and seeing how they’re used.
Since a lot of the work you do both in college and in the world of work is collaborative, you’re going to be making a collaborative project to present to the rest of us to enlighten us about a genre of your own choosing. Here’s what we’ll do (there will be more detailed assignment sheets as we move through this):
First, we’ll revisit Discourse Communities, including the ones you belong to.
Second, we’ll talk about the why and how of genres, and how to analyze what makes one.
Third, we’ll learn how to do a rhetorical analysis.
All of this will lead us to the Inquiry-based Discovery Project.
