Prompt: What are some strategies or low-stakes assignments you might use to teach your students what genre is, and how and why we move between genres in order to reach our audiences and achieve our desired outcomes? Try to think of strategies that you might be able to use online.

Genre Awareness (First Steps?)

• To prepare for class discussion and activities, I could ask students to read and annotate a three-page excerpt from The Bedford Book of Genres (Braziller, 2nd edition; pages 30, 32, 39). Doing so would introduce students to a framework for analyzing rhetorical situation and genre conventions. This specific excerpt provides a chart template, specific questions, and an engaging example.
• In a low-stakes assignment or discussion, I could offer students a long list of genres. I could ask students to brainstorm which different “types of texts” they’ve read in the past two weeks. Then I could ask students to choose one specific text that they’ve read recently and fill in the chart mentioned above.

Moving Between Genres (Intermediate Steps?)

• To prepare for class discussion and activities, I could ask students to read and annotate “Navigating Genres” by Kerry Dirk.
• In a low-stakes assignment, I could ask students to find something that they had written in a previous class, for work, or on social media. Then I could ask students to fill in the chart mentioned above for that specific text.
• In class, with blank copies of the chart, I could ask students to brainstorm in groups how they could move the information from that specific text into another genre for a new specific audience: Given a new audience, what could they really accomplish with this new text, in a new genre, and how could the text look?

Genre Awareness versus Audience Awareness (Early On, or Much Later On?)

• I wonder how I could separate, organize, or integrate class discussions about genre awareness and audience awareness.
• For example, I’m thinking of WIRED’s 5 LEVELS series (1 Season, 10 Episodes): “Can everything be explained to everyone in terms they can understand? In 5 Levels, an expert scientist explains a high-level subject in five different layers of complexity— first to a child, then a teenager, then an undergrad majoring in the same subject, a grad student and, finally, a colleague.”
• In a given video, while all the conversations are part of the same multimodal text, and while the modes of live conversation within the video generally remain the same, each live conversation uses different rhetorical appeals and communication styles.
• So perhaps I could use one of these videos to jump from choices in live conversation (across audiences) to choices in written texts (across audiences and across genres)?

To teach genre I was thinking about having an assignment with two parts: first the  students would choose  a genre that they are familiar with and write about the core rules and rhetorical strategies of the genre, and who the desired audience is. After they have solidified their set of rules, I would then have them analyze a work of art in the genre of their choosing through the rules that they have written.

The second part of the assignment would be for them to locate a parody of the genre they are choosing, and have them write about the parody and whether it adheres to or plays with the rules of the genre that they had established previously. After they have analyzed this, then they will be asked about  the effects that the parody has on the desired audience.

I did something similar at the beginning of our multi-modal composition unit on the discussion board this semester after instruction began online and the students seemed to understand and respond well. Since this was successful I think it could be easily done through online platforms.

Q: What are some strategies or low-stakes assignments you might use to teach your students what genre is, and how and why we move between genres in order to reach our audiences and achieve our desired outcomes? Try to think of strategies that you might be able to use online.

A: I liked the idea presented in the Murder/Rhetoric piece we read, since my trashy TV of choice is crime drama. Having a student review how one documents a crime scene is a good way to look for specific details. Then having a student write those details in different forms: from police report to a newspaper article–from newspaper article to a feature piece or eulogy–from a feature piece to… I’d say you could do the same with other jumping off points, and you could have a series of questions with each genre used: Who is the audience in A? Why do you say this? What does A want to see? What about B? (And so forth.) All of these would easily be taken from the internet.

I actually really like the ones suggested in both readings, so I would probably steal those.  I did ask my students in one class to read a poem and turn it into a newspaper article.  We did it very quickly, but if I were to build it out into a more formal assignment, we’d probably read some poems and articles as mentor texts, then have a discussion about the elements that define each genre. Then, I’d give them a specific poem and ask them to proceed with the task of turning the content into an article. In the end, I might ask them to analyze what they did to translate one thing into the other. I think once we all figure out what makes a specific genre a genre, we could proceed with a weekly “show and tell”.  Students bring in something that seems undefinable and proceed with applying the criteria. It might be interesting to ask them to create their own genre, although that might turn into a bigger assignment than what is being asked for here.  Perhaps we could start the steps as low-stakes assignments.

What are some strategies or low-stakes assignments you might use to teach your students what genre is, and how and why we move between genres in order to reach our audiences and achieve our desired outcomes? Try to think of strategies that you might be able to use online.

I actually found this great in-class genre exercise from the FSU Composition site Robert suggested in January. I tried this exercise in both my 1101 and 1121 classes this semester. It was a fun way to engage the class and get them thinking about genre. I tweaked the 1121 class lesson plan by adding in a discussion and analysis of multimodal genres. In both classes I started the class by asking them to define genre and how they came up with that definition.  I gave them five minutes to write the response and told them we can share the responses after class. After they finished writing I asked the class to name genres of films. Once we had six genres on the board, I broke the class up into six groups (the average size of the group was 4). I asked the group to answer these four questions about their film genre. (I lifted these questions from the FSU lesson plan)

1. Genre: What are the conventions of your group’s movie genre?
2. Audience: Who watches this type of movie?
3. Audience Expectation: What does an audience expect to experience/feel/learn/see from this genre?
4. Evidence: Provide 3 examples of movies that fit this type and explain why they fit.

I moved the conversation to writing and we talked about genres of writing, asking the class if a poster, text, letter, instruction manual, etc. was a genre? And why? We filled the board with a long list of genres.

I asked the class to answer the original question about genre that I had written on the board again, and if there were any difference between the first response and the second, and if so, what they were. The class shared a few responses and we had a short class discussion. We also discussed subgenre and about rhetoric and genre.

After we completed this exercise, I handed out copies of Dirk’s reading, which was the assigned reading for the next class. The students referred to the exercise in both their writing responses and the following class discussion on the Dirk reading. I have been thinking of how I could do this online. I might try to break this into a series of discussion posts, with three people working together in groups to answer the questions about their assigned genre.

Why I think this exercise worked–I think starting a discussion with a subject the class is familiar with (like film) helped the students understand the broader concept of genre and the role of the audience.

I love the low stakes assignment that Janet Boyd in “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking)” uses because it seems like such a creative way to teach students about genre awareness. She gives students five specific facts about a murder and tells them to write about it. Borrowing from Boyd, I would do the same. I could give five facts about a character and have students write a short story about the character, a blog post from the character’s perspective, or a song about the character. In general, I think it’s important to show examples of different genres, too. Another option that I think will help is to show multiple genres about one specific theme. For example, the theme could be “prison reform” and I would be able to show blogs, newspaper articles, poems, narratives, songs, court files, books, etc. all about the topic. I do believe that all of these assignments will be simple enough to follow in a virtual world.

Overall, I believe that genre awareness is one of the most important parts of the reading AND writing experience. For me, genre awareness and audience awareness are two sides of the same coin. Learning how to differentiate an audience and a genre is probably the most important thing a person can learn in this world; the writing rules for sending an email to a boss and sending a text message to a friend have very distinct stipulations. Continuing to emphasize these differences are necessary.

Hi everyone!  Just to recap, here is our upcoming schedule:

April 23:  3 pm Zoom call. By this date, please review 1101 Units 2 and 3 (below) as well as Kerry Dirk’s “Navigating Genre” ( you may recall we read this one million years ago, in January) and read “Murder, Rhetorically Speaking”. Please write a post (New Post) on Open Lab before our April 23 meeting answering the following question: (You can use the category 1101 Unit 2)

What are some strategies or low-stakes assignments you might use to teach your students what genre is, and how and why we move between genres in order to reach our audiences and achieve our desired outcomes? Try to think of strategies that you might be able to use online.

Download (PDF, 4.34MB)