"Thlog Thursday" Take One

Week one of classes and I’m already stressed to the max. The only bright light is writing 2. Okay, so not really, but it is my favorite class I’m taking this quarter. After doing all the readings for this week (for once) I feel pretty good about this class. I found the reading by Dirk, Navigating Genres, really interesting. I had always known what a genre was, but never thought about it any further than being a basic and broad umbrella to categorize movies and books. As I was reading this passage, I kept associating ideas Dirk said with things I learned in my Communication theory class. Dirk quotes Lloyd Bitzer and says, “comparable situations occur, prompting comparable responses; hence rhetorical forms are born and special vocabulary, grammar, and style are established.” This reminds me a lot of Social Learning Theory. Social Learning Theory is considered a media theory, and the concept is kind of similar to what Bitzer said. It assumes that people remember behaviors enacted by others and act upon them when they perceive some sort of reward. We can apply that to genre theory by saying that people model their writing, vocabulary, grammar, etc. based off of what others have done in the past. Making connections between the reading and things I am already familiar with, in this case communication theories, really helped me grasp a clear understanding of the concept. 

Something else I really liked reading about was how two texts that are in the same genre could look completely different. The example with the ransom notes really helped demonstrate this idea. It made me consider research papers, having had to write many of them throughout my academic career. Each one required something slightly different, but they were still the same genre. If I had known what I now know about genre, I think I would have taken a different approach in writing many of my papers.

 I am excited to see what the rest of the class has in store and how my writing will improve over time!