My Thoughts on Genre

Genres indeed are everywhere. Even the way we speak is tailored to whom we are addressing. Even that last sentence I just wrote is a completely different genre than this one. And this one. You get it. At school, especially at the collegiate level, we are expected to write in an academic genre and are expected to sound professional in our writing. Boooooring. If I may speak freely for a moment, I quite like that I don’t have to be incredibly formal in this blog and can voice my opinion in a manner that doesn’t make me sound like a stuffy busybody (no offense to people who like sounding like that). I’ve only really had one job: I was a barista in a grocery store Starbucks. I was an employee of the grocery store, so I was expected to uphold their values in the way I addressed customers (an expectation that sometimes went out the window after a long day of serving Frappuccinos to snotty teenagers and cranky adults). I didn’t do much writing besides people’s names on their cups, but when I was applying for that job, again I had to sound professional and like I knew what I was doing (ha funny). Without sounding like I was pleading (low key I was), I had to convince my future employers I could be trusted to do a good job and that I would be an asset to their workplace. I have yet to have an internship, but when I do I’ll be sure to include that. My life consists of many genres. I speak and write very informally outside of school and work. I cuss, I use words that don’t exist, I’m lazy with my language, but I don’t really care. It’s my mouth, I’ll say what I want to (in the wise words of Miley Cyrus). However, when I write something like a Facebook post, I try to use full sentences and correct grammar so I don’t look like that much of an idiot. Each of these genres are unique in that each differs so vastly from the other. The way I speak and write naturally is so different from one of my essays, or my resume. In this aspect, I think genre is important; you don’t want to sound incompetent to a future employer or a professor and you still get to express yourself. Genres serve to provide variation in our writing. Can you imagine if we all wrote the same way? Harry Potter would be awfully boring, that’s for sure. It’s designed to allow different forms of expression among different writers. J.K. Rowling can write in a completely different way from Stephanie Meyer (meaning she can write something that doesn’t sound like a love struck teenager wrote it. Sorry if anyone still likes Twilight, but Stephanie would be better off writing fan fiction. At least she’d be able to be less PC about a sex scene. Anyway, I digress). Devitt believes genre awareness is important because it generates a kind of rhetorical awareness which produces critical awareness and more deliberate action. It helps to know what makes one genre different from another because you learn to pick and choose when and where to use them in order to, I guess, in a sense, make yourself sound better and fit in with that community. When Devitt writes that "When writers take up a genre, they take up that genre's ideology" (339), she means that we as writers adapt to that style’s “personality” and write the rest our paper or whatever it is we’re writing in that vernacular. A genre’s ideology is the area of thought it sits in and the so-called “rules” that go with it. If you’re writing something like a blog, the genre is informal and doesn’t really follow any set of rules other than the author’s personal style. Harry Potter and Twilight are fantasies and are written as such, with elements of the supernatural and mystical. An academic paper is structured as a professional piece of work meant to be taken seriously and it is written as such. Alight, I’m gonna be honest, I’ve reached my limit with this genre nonsense. This word count tis killing me and I have just about run out of things to say on this subject so now I’m just gonna write for a little bit. Genres are cool; they give us a wide range of different things to read and write and are a great source of creativity.