Tesha Donald
ENG 1121 E106
Professor: Schmerler
March 11, 2019
Reading 2 is an article called āNavigating Genresā by a professor named Kerry Dirk. The link is here: Navigating Genres.
After completing Reading 2, please answer the following in writing. You can write in your notebooks for now, but be ready to post your responses to Open Lab under the same category soon after our next class:
1) This article (though somewhat old) mentions Facebook posts as a kind of genre. Can you briefly describe how comfortable you feel composing a piece of writing in this genre? Do you feel more comfortable than someone much older than you ā your grandmother, for instance? Why do you think this older person might not write as well in Facebook as you do? What are some of the mistakes they might make? 2) Dirk gives a few examples of titles in The Onion (a newspaper that was founded in 1988 at a college, btw). What was your favorite title? 3) On page 258, Dirk describes the rules we carry around in our head before we start writing in a particular genre. What are some of the rules you carry around in your head? Is there a particular genre in which you struggle to write?
When you think of Facebook as a genre, it is not necessarily formatted or outlined in a particular way. Writing in this genre would be easy to write, most importantly because if your page is privatized then you generally know your audience as family, friends, coworkers and perhaps associates. You also know yourself, are you writing to get a response or are you writing to receive feedback or give a sneak peak in on your everyday life. In general everyone writes in a different way on their Facebook. When you speak of older generations, as someone who is younger I am a bit more tech savvy as it pertains to online social media so speaking to my audience might be easier for me versus my grandmother who will say she cannot see or she may need guidance. Even more interesting, my grandfather would say something along the lines of, āI do not have time for such nonsenseā or āidle hands make fretful mindsā. They would not know where to log in, how to submit or where to go. If they even could they would call for one of the grandchildren to type for them. More than likely they are not going online, they barely want to use a cell phone.
My favorite example in the titles would have to be āAmazon.com Recommendations Understand Area Woman Better Than Husbandā. The slight ridicule is implying that married men have a hard time understanding their wives. I thought that was little funny and dramatic. Some rules I utilize in my writing is minimizing starting sentences with I. Writing should have structure start point such as an introduction and end point. Definitely the rule about not beginning a sentence with a coordinating conjunction. These are all good rules I use in everyday writing. Believe it or not I even use this when writing my work emails. I have done a lot of writing in my time and never particular struggle until I arrived to this class. I think writing with restrictions is a little difficult for me. I like writing free form and then going back to see the end result. In the case of writing with a word cap limit that would pose the most difficulty.
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