Genres

Honestly, when I first saw how long Devitts article was, I was like

and after reading about a paragraph of reading it and not understanding any of it I was like

But when I actually sat down and read it I began to agree more and more with Devitt. She talks about how the idea of genre could be extremely boring based on how it is taught. In high school I remember being taught genre in a way that was extremely repetitive and formulaic because of the different outlines I was forced to memorize just so I could write the essays the way my teachers thought was best. Devitt fears that because of the way genre is taught, people will succumb to writing the same way everyone else was taught. She fears that because people don’t have genre awareness and are not immersed and participating in genre that people will assimilate into using the same formula of writing everyone has been using since elementary school.

Devitt defines genre as “social and rhetorical actions: they develop their languages and forms out of rhetorical aims and contexts shared by groups of users”. To me, this means that genres are made up of the different actions of the ones involved in the genre, and how they perform these actions. The context, a well as the people within the context are important. In the text, Devitt claims, "Whenwriters take up a genre, they take up that genre's ideology" (339). In other words, the type of genre dictates the way it is written. For example, texting friends is one of the everyday situations we find ourselves in. When we text, we decide whether or not we use emoji’s, abbreviations, or correct grammar depending on the person we are talking to and the topic of conversation. I know when I text my friends, I call them inappropriate things that I would never call my professor through an email, or any other instance for that matter. The genre changes as the situation and people change. Devitt also talks about genre awareness. Genre awareness is a person’s ability to identity similarities between academic writings they find at places at school and writing they encounter in their every day lives.  She believes that genre awareness is important because it is also important for a person to participate in genre, rather than just analyze it.

Devitt states that "explicit genre teaching" can be very limiting and that genre could be taught in better ways that are more expansive and engaging. This is where I found it interesting that she mentions five – paragraph essays, and how teaching them have many pros and cons. After writing the same five paragraph essays the same way for four years, I found myself struggling with classes that required me to write journals, lab reports, or creative narratives. I always thought there were specific ways of writing each. Every time I tried to write something I immediately thought I was doing it wrong, or that it sounded too much like a formative essay. There was also a teacher I had in high school that made us memorize 15 different vocabulary words every week, quizzed us on them, and removed points from our essays if we didn’t use any. She also made us write journals, which I thought was going to be fun. But in the end, she told us to just copy a piece of text and analyze it. After taking her class, I decided that I did not want to be an English major and I did not want to take a writing class. (If you couldn’t tell, I hated this teacher). Anyways, like Devitt said I think that explicitly teaching genre a certain way can limit a persons writing and genre awareness.

All in all, I agreed with most of Devitts points. I believe that in todays education system, teachers could make writing so much easier and less boring if topics such as genre were taught in different ways rather than just teaching the same five paragraph essay. Though it is important, I feel like expanding writing genres will open new doors to many people, like inspiring people to write music, poetry, books, or even just allowing them to feel comfortable writing in a journal. After reading Devitts article, I think (hopefully) ill be a lot more attentive to different genres I may come across and think about the different genres I might want to include in my own writing.