Navigating Genres

by Kerry Dirk

Overview — In this chapter, I introduce students to genres as rhetorical responses to reoccurring or similar situations. After defining genre in the context of rhetoric and composition scholarship, I use examples from popular culture, discussion from contemporary scholars, and personal experience to show students how genre awareness requires a rhetorical way of looking at writing. This chapter is meant not to teach students how to write in any one particular genre; rather, it is meant to help students start to see their own writing endeavors as texts that function within the context of genres.

Make Your “Move”: Writing in Genres

by Brad Jacobson, Madelyn Pawlowski & Christine M. Tardy

Overview — When approaching new genres, students often wonder what kind of information to include and how. Rhetorical moves analysis, a type of genre analysis, offers a useful, practical approach for students to understand how writers achieve their goals in a genre through various writing strategies. In this chapter, we introduce students to moves analysis, first describing what it is and then explaining various strategies for analyzing moves. The chapter walks students through moves analysis with both a familiar low-stakes genre (student absence emails) and a less familiar professional genre (grant proposals), demonstrating how such an analysis can be carried out. The goal of the chapter is to familiarize students with rhetorical moves analysis as a practical tool for understanding new genres and for identifying options that can help writers carry out their goals.

Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking)

by Janet Boyd

Overview — Rather than merely define rhetoric and provide examples, this chapter asks students to participate in playful exercises that revolve around a hypothetical murder. While the facts remain the same, the rhetorical situations vary: you can invite your students to write as if they are detectives, coroners, eulogists, and lawyers. In each situation, the rhetorical demands are different; however, students will be encouraged that they know how to respond from their own experience or from examples by other student writers that demonstrate how responses might vary and why. The progression of the writing exercises will help you and your students identify and define which rhetorical strategies they are already capable of employing and help them to think about how such strategies can apply to academic writing.

Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing

by Marjorie Stewart

Overview — “Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing” uses the metaphor of weaving to demonstrate one way of using personal and narrative writing within academic essays. Rather than debate whether narrative is appropriate for academic writing, it addresses the question of when is it appropriate and how it can be done effectively, focusing on helping writers decide when the use of personal experience is appropriate for their purpose, how to make personal experience and narrative pull its weight in the essay, and how the ability to incorporate personal experience can translate into the ability to incorporate research.

The essay is structured as an example of the use of personal experience as well as a how-to guide. “Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing” contains a discussion of three students who incorporated narrative in their essays in three ways: as a structural frame, as an example when the research topic and personal experience overlap, and as a tool for discovery. Students will benefit from the peer-written examples as well as the use of the personal in the essay itself.

Why Blog? Searching for Writing on the Web

by Alex Reid

Overview — Blogging offers unique opportunities for first year composition writers to develop personal motivations and rewards for writing. This chapter will help you encourage students to find an approach to the unique rhetorical features of blogging as a genre. Students may need detailed assistance as they get started in the blogosphere; this chapter will includes strategies students can use to identify the kind of blog they wish to create, suggestions for composing blog posts, and technical advice on issues such as layout/design, widgets, embedding media, comment moderation, and RSS (a web feed). If blogging is new to you as a teacher, you will find guidance here expanding how and what you teach.

Punctuation’s Rhetorical Effects

by Kevin Cassell

Overview — Many students tend to think of punctuation as governed by a set of rules. This chapter encourages them to conceive of punctuation as a system of conventions, which includes standard expectations of correct usage—certain “rules”—but applies them within a broader rhetorical context. After distinguishing between punctuation and grammar (the two terms are often associated), students are provided with three reading strategies to help them become aware of how punctuation operates in printed texts. The first strategy, explicit reading, adopts Writing Spaces author Mike Bunn’s Reading Like a Writer (RLW) approach, but emphasizes a reading style that is sensory. The second strategy, visual reading, asks students to adopt a “typographical perspective” when reading so that they literally see how punctuation operates. The third one, aural reading, asks them to listen – possibly by reading aloud – to how punctuation conveys an author’s tone of voice, which can help to illustrate context. Palpably experiencing punctuation usage while reading will help students use it with confidence and facility in their own writing.

“I Passed First-Year Writing—What Now?”: Adapting Strategies from First-Year Writing to Writing in the Disciplines

by Amy Cicchino

Overview — This chapter foreshadows challenges you can experience as you adapt your writing beyond your first-year writing course to become a writer in your discipline. The essay contains a student scenario, defines key rhetorical concepts within discipline-specific writing situations, and gives you strategies for adapting these rhetorical concepts to new writing situations. After reading this chapter, you will better understand how the concepts introduced in first-year writing connect to the writing you will encounter in your upper-level, disciplinary courses and identify strategies that will help you intentionally adapt writing knowledge to new discipline-specific contexts.