Social Constructs that Reflect Shared Textual Expectations Essay
We now enter into the thick of writing fundamentals: genre. The first lecture aims to warm you up to the idea of genre by offering a basic definition that you are going to hear far too many times because genre is at once the most obvious and the most impenetrable of the knowledge domains.
At the end of the lecture, you will find the first assignment of this module.
Genres are created by people in particular discourse communities who find that they are doing something again and again (recurring social action) and they turn this action into a form (typified).
Genre as a typified recurrent social action. An example of a typified recurrent social action is an application for a driver’s license.
A genre is an activity that people have decided to formalize to ensure that something that needs to get done, gets done. It’s a kind of checklist or operating manual. Sometimes the conventions are made quite explicit and clear, such as the lab report with subject headers and clear criteria for what goes in each section, (Links to an external site.)other times the conventions, expectations, purposes are exceedingly vague.
Arguably, the most vague of written genres are the assignments teachers give to students.
We in writing studies call those assignments “school genres” or “mutt genres” (Links to an external site.)
because, well, they aren’t authentic genres. They are kind of the Bacos of written genres:
They do have a purpose–to provide students with an opportunity to explore and document learning about something, and to practice writing sentences, expanding vocabulary, learning paragraphing, developing a thesis.
But the student writing assignment is a dead-end thing; it has no social purpose. It is not a social action. Therefore students are always a bit bewildered about what it is they are supposed to be writing, how to organize it, what kind or how much evidence to provide, and so on.
Authentic genres have real social needs and those are built into the genre. There is no one teacher to please when you are dealing with authentic genres, such as cover letters, emails, executive summaries. There may be readers to please (e.g., bosses) but in the hands of a savvy writer, the genre will meet and exceed the boss’s whims.
To be fair, it isn’t just school genres that can bewilder a writer. There are folks out there deliberately working to expose, explode, destroy, and hybridize genres. I think this may be at the top of the artist’s job description, particularly those in the avant-garde or experimental discourse communities. For an example of an avant-garde community making hay with genres, check out my colleague Kenny Goldsmith’s podcasts.
(Links to an external site.) We see genre-busters in academic discourse communities, as well, most spectacularly the deconstructivists who are still regarded with much suspicion by analytic philosophers, among others.
(Links to an external site.) Why do these folks feel compelled to attack or defend genres? Because genres can perpetuate practices, values, beliefs, feelings that work against–or ensure–what we hope to achieve in our various discourse communities. Genres are powerful but seldom appreciated social actions.
Free-write for two minutes on genre on the text entry box below. Just write whatever pops into your head, stream of consciousness. Don’t censor yourself. Don’t worry about grammar or mechanics or spelling. This short assignment will not be shared with others.
As I hope the upcoming joke exercise will reveal, genres should never be approached as merely a set of conventions, check boxes, formulaic templates. Those conventions are important: They are what the authors of the genre determined over time were things that had to be included in order to get the job done.
The real job of writing is always human communication, and each genre has an all-too-human design on its readers. In the case of the joke, the social purpose is clear: The author wants to surprise you and make you laugh, perhaps make you see the world differently, perhaps even wants to change how you go about living your life. Those little jokes, following a rather remarkably templated structure, can carry a big social punch.
With this in mind, please post to the discussion board below an example of a genre where at some point you felt the humanness, the social purpose behind the conventions. Describe that human quality, the traces or realization of the social purpose and feelings that drive and inform the genre. Describe how you struggled with it and achieved, or failed to achieve, its social purpose.
To get you started, let me point to greeting cards as one of those genres that reminds you that for the efforts of the greeting card makers to acquit us of the need to express a social feeling to another human being on the given occasion, the signer of the card nearly always feels a twinge of something like a failure to realize the social purpose of that card, whether it’s a card of condolence, congratulation, or gratitude. Feel free to talk about the greeting card as a genre bearing all sorts of feelings, values, human expectations and symbolic meanings. But you might want to test out another genre, perhaps even a workplace one, to explore its human aspirations, emotions, expectations. What is the social action, the human purpose of the genre: what does the genre want you to do, or feel, upon receiving it?
One way to grasp how genres work is to take up a familiar one: the joke. Comics divide jokes into two basic categories, those created by accident, and those created by craft. Amateur comics are all about the former, waiting for funny things to happen to them and reporting these to their friends. As with writing, so too with jokes: If you are not consciously aware of the craft, you cannot reproduce the results. You don’t know why a joke (or a piece of writing) works, and thus you have no control over it. You can only peck away hoping that what you did that one time will happen again. That’s why there are so many “first novelists” and “first screenwriters” whom we never hear from again: They don’t know what they did the first time; the material presented itself to them. Same with jokes. Comedians make jokes; amateurs have to wait for something funny to happen to them.
Task: Make Some Jokes
For this exercise, I am going to put you into groups and give you a list of Ellen DeGeneres
Most people dream of winning an academy award. I had a dream of actually hosting the Academy Awards. Let that be a lesson to you kids out there: Aim lower.
When I look back on the stuff I used to wear, I wonder why somebody didnt try to stop me. Just a friendly warning–You may regret this–would have been fine.
Rodney Dangerfield
When I was a kid, my parents moved a lot. But I always found them.
Last year my birthday cake looked like a prairie fire.
My psychiatrist told me I was crazy. I said I wanted a second opinion and he said, Okay, youre ugly, too.
Wanda Sykes
“It’s harder being gay than it is being black. I didn’t have to come out to my parents as black.”
Moms Mabley
“Anytime you see me with my arms around an old man, I’m holding him for the police.”
Joan River
My body is falling so fast, my gynecologist wears a hard hat.
It’s actually a very useful rhetorical tool, along with being one of the central comic genres. If you search a bit on the internet, you will find many people urging you to add self-deprecating jokes to your workplace toolkit, a means of making friends and influencing people. One note of caution: do not deprecate your expertise or authority. Deprecate something about yourself that really does not much matter to you or to your audience.
Working with your assigned group members, analyze and synthesize the features of this genre, and then see if you can actually bring the genre of the joke to life.
1. Using the directions above, introduce yourselves. Note that you have several things you can do in group on the left hand navigation bar: home, announcements, pages, people, discussions, files, conferences, collaboration: you will be using the discussion board only, though feel free to use the other features). Appoint one person as your final scribe/spokesperson. Then proceed together to sort out how each of the jokes provided are alike and different (by the way, this exercise of comparison/contrast–variously called synthesis, or pattern-finding–is key to learning, innovating, and problem-solving).
2. Based on your collective analysis, as a group come up with a single set of instructions–a recipe, if you will–for how to write a self-deprecating joke.
3. Faithfully following your group’s “recipe,” each member of the group must write a joke. Note that your joke does not have to be funny and in fact probably won’t be (you will find out how difficult it is to be funny). It should just adhere to the “recipe” your group has formulated.
4. Now, as an official comedy writing team, your group must do its best to come up with one funny joke from the ones that have been produced. Revise as needed to get laughs. Make a note of how and why you revised. .
5. Finally, as a group, reflect upon what this exercise has taught you about imitating a genre based only on surface features (ie, how many words, what kinds of words)–which is typically how people imitate, say, cover letters or resumes–versus attempting to understand a genre by considering its designated function, its social action: in this case, making people laugh.
6. Finally, the group’s scribe should cohere, smooth, and polish the consensus portions of the group text.
As I hope is becoming increasingly clear, genres are complex, dynamic entities and thus there are many ways to analyze them. For example, 1) identifying the characteristic features of the genre (what makes an email an email, or a joke a joke?) is one way to analyze genres (and typically the most common approach). Deepening the analysis would entail recognizing 2) how those features came to be typified and recurrent: what social action are they working to fulfill? 3) Another way to analyze genres is to think about the discourse community using the genre–the writer’s and the readers’ discourse community if they are not members of the same community. You also need to look at 4) how that genre fits into the activity system of the writer and reader: What processes, what activities, are part of creating or delivering this genre to its readers? We’ll be talking more about that in a future module. Last, but not exhaustively, an analyst of a genre will examine the 5) language and structural choices the writer makes in terms of the social, cultural, and psychological aspects that consciously or unconsciously shape what the writer writes and how the reader perceives it. Such analysis will lead to an understanding of the writer, reader, and life of the genre.
In the discussion link below, think about the very familiar genre of the email and its affordances (what you can do with them) and constraints (boundaries/prohibitions/limits/taboos). Choosing a specific discourse community or community of practice, share with us the politeness strategies used in your selected community’s emails. For example, how do you open and close them: with a “Dear” and a “Sincerely,” or with a “Hi” and a “Best”? First name or last name in your salutation (if there is a salutation in this community). When do you cc others or bcc others? Do you always open with a few social sentences (“I hope this email finds you well”) or do you get to the action item.
What about subject headers? Any conventions for those?
What are some violations of politeness strategies? Emojis? Abbreviations?
