Blog #2 Genres Genres Genres

Welpp..

After only taking 1 RWS class and 0 English classes at state, it was a STRUGGLE to read through that 15 page reading. Not going to lie, I read at least 40 of those sentences 4 times due to the fact that my mind drifted midway through the first word. Don't get me wrong though I like reading, just I tend to be more attentive when it is my GENRE of my choosing. 

Amy Devitt.. she was sent from heaven to bless us with some knowledge. As students, I know we ALL have asked ourselves "When are we EVER going to use "(insert subject/concepts here)" in our field of work". Amy is here to shed a little light on how we have been brainwashed to believe that writing is just a blueprint we must follow in all of our writing, rather than seeing it as a way to expand our creativity as writers through other genres of writing.  Devitt defines genre as "social and rhetorical actions" that enables creativity and originality. Though due to the lack of "critical genre awareness", teaching genres has become more of a barrier. 

SDSU has had an honor of blessing me with this thing I'd like to call "The 5 annoying paragraphs of death" papers or the 5 paragraph papers for short. Either one, it's very dreadful to say/hear. However, I have to admit it has taught me how to formally argue an opinion and then counter argue it then counter the counter argument, regardless of how I really feel about the original argument.  At my job, everything I write on are pre-made court documents so I guess you can say it's fill in the blank type stuff. Nothing really unique except for the fact that it doesn't require much thought when because it isn't what I want, it's what the city wants. As for my life... Resumes, Emails and Texting are the big 3. Resumes and emails are always written in a professional manner, unless you don't actually want the job your applying for or you want your professor to hate you. Texting on the other hand is my paradise of illiteracy and improper grammar (though I'm pretty sure my grammar isn't so hot writing these blogs).

Back to the 5 paragraph essays, we have learned, written, and been critiqued on that genre of writing so many times that it should be a tool for all of us to use in the future. But this isn't the case for most of us. Am I right? It's understandable if we learned about it once or twice but a majority of the time? It has left us uneducated about other genres of writing we encounter now and are likely to encounter later. 

Critical genre awareness, Devitt emphasizes, is teaching the background of genres rather than just giving students templates to follow. Make available the culture and history of the genre without giving us exact instructions we must follow in order for our writing to be deemed that specific genre.  It allows us to depict what we think the genre is in our words, in our way.  If we can't take genres that we learn and make our own versions of it can we really call it our writing? or can we really say we are growing as writers? We are just filling in the blanks of a template. So every time we think of english classes or writing classes we have it engraved in our heads that it's the 5 paragraph structured essays and nothing else. Which is what Devitt is trying to argue when she states "Without developing their genre awareness, people are more at the mercy of existing genres and existing power structures and dynamics" (347). If we don't know anything but the structure of a genre we are prone to follow/write in that form.

And that’s what we have been doing for the past years.  Teachers have just been choosing the genres they want to teach, skipping the in between, and going straight into the paragraph structure. And now here we are 1 genre smarter, 50 more to go. I wonder why so many teachers choose to teach this type of writing and why they decided not to branch out into other genres that may help students in the real world.  

I find it weird that the whole time I was writing this blog, I kept forgetting it’s a blog and that I didn’t need to answer and follow the format of Professor Flewelling’s blog. But I tried to but then I drifted off into my own thought, so I had to go back and erase and try to answer them. And at the same time I felt like I NEEDED to put quotes and argue why she said what. Again this is just me lacking critical awareness and trying to format my writing according to the 5 paragraph writing. The most frustrating feeling when you have the freedom to write in your own way but you’re habits eat away at you but you end up feeling like you just wrote a whole lot of something everywhere. GREAT. 

Till next timeeee....