Blog #1: BBG Chapter 1
Please place a link to your BBG 1 blog post in the comments below. Please include a brief description of what specific topics you addressed and your course number.
This response should be somewhere between 100 and 200 words. You can respond in any genre you feel appropriate. You'll want to focus your work on one or two key concepts. For instance, in this chapter you may want to discuss rhetorical situation, genre, audience, one of the rhetorical appeals, conventions, or a review of some of the example texts.
I realize that many of you do not have blogs set up yet. Don't worry. You can post your responses when your blog is up. Your first two blog posts should be up online by January 18.
If you have questions you can always email me! I'm looking forward to reading your thoughts on "Understanding Genres."
My thoughts:
Understanding the framework of genres and composition can be useful, especially for student like us who are surrounded by so many options for communicating our messages. With just a smartphone, there seems to be countless genres we can use--Snapchat, Instagram, SMS, Facebook. And even within these genres there are often "subgenres" like your snapchat story, or Instagram trends like your "best nine" and new options on the iOs messaging system. Let alone more "traditional" genres of composing like an essay or speech. It's helpful because instead of approaching every new text as if it were completely unique, we can establish some expectations for what we are about to read. Placing a text within the framework of a genre we've encountered before can help us establish expectations for what we are going to encounter, making it easier to focus on what is being said instead of how it is being said. If we "read" a snap on Snapchat, we know there isn't going to be a whole lot of actual words because it only appears for a short time. We also know, it can't be THAT important because soon it will go away for forever. When we read an essay, we assume there will be some sort of introduction and some sort of conclusion that we are supposed to draw from the essay. Of course, genres are always changing and mixing. That’s what is so great about language—it keeps up with the changing world. It’s important to remember that genres are almost impossible to define—they aren’t definite categories; they are more like frameworks through which we can interpret texts. Too much focus on exactly what makes a certain genre a genre is problematic, as inhibits growth, change, or subversion of what has been already established. On the other hand, sometimes standardization can be really helpful. If everyone addressed an envelope in any way they thought useful, with the information in any order, it would take the mail sorters forever to figure out where things were going and they might not even get to the correct mailbox at all. (People still mail things, right?) We have many more days and weeks of discussing genre. I’m looking forward to what you all have to say about genre and the other elements discussed in this chapter.
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