Blog #2: Genre

I've said before I am not such a good writer. I use as an excuse that I am really good at math and numbers but not at writing. Because of this, writing has never been my favorite subject. After reading the article by Amy Devitt, I remembered why reading isn't my favorite either. Im just kidding. I did have a hard time reading it, that, I'm not kidding about that.

I had never thought about genre in the way Amy Devitt expresses it. When it came to genre, I'd relate the word to movies, music, books, writing... etc. Never did I think about genre in such depth as Devitt goes in her article. Sure I had thought about how the purpose of a comedian is to make people laugh, how a horror movie is to supposed to make people scared, a sad song provide empathy for your unfortunate love life and so on... But had never thought "critically" about genre, like Devitt mentions in her article.

I think that if Devitt read that first paragraph, she would argue that I do not possess much genre awareness, if any.

Something that came to my mind is that a lot of the time, I believe we attach the genre of something to the purpose that something attempts to achieve. That is why a horror movie that is not scary is portrayed as a bad scary movie, because it failed to made us scared. Or a comedian that doesn't make you laugh, or a science fiction movie which has horrible special effects. In other words, most of the time we expect something from each specific genre.

After reading Devitt's article, I think this is due to the way Devitt believes genre is taught most of the time. That is: explicitly and outside of social meaning. By explicitly, I mean that genre often is taught in a way that restricts creativity and limits cognition rather than expanding knowledge. For example, Devitt talk about the 5-paragraph essay format which is used in the great majority of high schools. She explains how if a student were to include an anecdote in his/her writing, that anecdote would be limited to one paragraph. The way I interpret this is that by limiting the students' ability to write or reducing a an anecdote to something extremely simplistic such as a paragraph, you also limit that student's ability to write and think critically.

Another way Devitt explains how teaching genre "explicitly" limits the assessment of knowledge is by how a certain genre, if thought about uncritically, will make us write to an unrealistic audience. If we for example write two 5-paragraph essays, one with our professor as the audience while the other is written to a firm with interest in some research we conducted (which it is usually not the case), the genre of the 5-paragraph essay would be completely different while being the same genre, a 5-paragraph essay.

By using an article by Viva Freedman, Devitt asks "whether learners could in fact gain full access to the languages and forms of genres" (338). And from what I understood, the answer to that is no because teachers can not possibly have knowledge for all possible students might want to learn and so their instruction about genre will never be complete. On the other hand, students can be taught "critical genre awareness" which is a skill that results in students distancing themselves from the topic addressed and that way obtain more credibility or ethos to write a certain topic.

Although it was a article which took me a while to read, "Teaching Critical Genre Awareness" by Amy Devitt, gave me a view of genres in a way I had never seen them before. Before reading this article, I didn't give much importance to the implications and norms each genre involves and how they influence our way of writing if it happens to be a written genre or speaking if it happens to be a speech or so. But now I do. Kind of.