Starting your Genre AnalysisWednesday, May 16th

Goals for today Discuss Devitt, Bawarshi, and Reiff

Find your three articles

Understand how to write your Preliminary Genre Analysis assignment

Be ready to work on this assignment as much as possible before Monday.

Write What is “genre analysis?” What does it

allow us to do? Find a quote to support your response

Hint: Look at pg. 541-545 and 553-557.

Ethnography? Genre Study?Genre analysis “links patterns of language use to patterns of social behavior” (542).

Genre study “allows students and researchers to recognize how ‘lived textuality’ plays a role in the lived experience of a group. Teaching students how to analyze genres can provide discipline and focus to the study of discourse communities” (542).

From Carolyn Miller (quoted by Bawarshi) “Genres are not just forms. Genres are

forms of life, ways of being. They are frames for social action […] locations within which meaning is constructed. Genres shape the thoughts we form and the communications by which we interact. Genres are the familiar places we go to create intellible communicative action with each other and the guideposts we use to explore the unfamiliar” (550).

Please reply to this status with a brief introduction about yourself. What is your major? Where are you from? What are your interests? What do you hope to gain out of comp II?

Jury Instructions? “Might?” “Genre analysis strong suggests that the specialist and nonspecialist

users have different beliefs, interests, and purposes as well as levels of knowledge” (543).

“students should see the messiness and especially the exclusiveness of genres” (543).

“Juries do not and cannot interpret the genre the way its creators intended, as lawyers would, and cannot render verdicts that follow those instructions fully and accurately, thus resulting in significant consequences, particularly for defendants” (544).

Homework and Reminders

Read Devitt (posted on Facebook) and take notes in your journal

Work on your Preliminary Genre Analysis paper

You can send me drafts at any point

In your groups Each group gets a section from the

assignment sheet (Patterns, Subject, Participants, Features)

Look through the questions listed in your section, and write 1-3 paragraphs that address those questions. Type and post on your FB Page.

ExampleSetting: Where did you find your article? What other articles were published in the same issue or journal? How did you access your article?

The article, “Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities,” written by Amy Devitt, Anis Bawarshi, and Mary Jo Reiff, was published in the 2003 issue of College English. According to the journal’s website, College English is “the professional journal for the college scholar-teacher. CE publishes articles about literature, rhetoric-composition, critical theory, creative writing theory and pedagogy, linguistics, literacy, reading theory, pedagogy, and professional issues related to the teaching of English. Each issue also includes opinion pieces, review essays, and letters from readers.” This article was also published along with multiple other pieces concerning how genres mediate activities in discourse communities. These articles include Amy Devitt’s, “Assignment by Design,” which focuses on how teachers can help students understand how to analyze genres more effectively. Though I accessed this article through the online database EBSCO Host, the journal is also published and available in hard copy.

What to work on? Find your articles

Start your analysis. Look at the patterns.

Read Devitt before Monday, and take notes in your journal.