2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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).
5. 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).
6. 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?
7.
8.
9. 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).
10. 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
11. In your groups
Each group gets a section from the
assignment sheet (Patterns, Subject,
Participants, Features)
Lookthrough the questions listed in your
section, and write 1-3 paragraphs that
address those questions. Type and post on
your FB Page.
12. Example
Setting: 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.
13. What to work on?
Find your articles
Start your analysis. Look at the patterns.
Read Devitt before Monday, and take
notes in your journal.
