1. Navigating Genres

by Kerry Dirk

Author’s 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.

Discussion Questions

1. What are some genres that you feel you know well? How did you learn them? What are their common rhetorical features?
2. What rules have you been told to follow in the past? How did they shape what you were writing?
3. How much freedom do you enjoy when writing? Does it help to have a form to follow, or do you find it to be limiting?

2. Make Your “Move”: Writing in Genres

by Brad Jacobson, Madelyn Pawlowski & Christine M. Tardy

Author’s 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.

Discussion Questions

1. The authors of this chapter present a brief moves analysis of “student absence emails.” Why do you think these moves have become typical of this genre? If you have written a similar email recently, discuss how or if your moves align with the moves described in the chapter. How might your relationship with your professor affect the moves you use in such an email? What other factors might affect your use of different moves, or even your language choices within those moves? How might the moves in an absence email compare to a “grade change request” or an “appointment request” email to a professor?
2. After analyzing student absence emails for moves, write three samples: one that you think is “prototypical” of this genre, one that you think would be poorly received by the instructor, and one that is not standard but would be especially successful. What did you learn from writing these samples? How did your moves analysis inform the choices you made in writing?
3. The discussion of the grant proposal Statement of Need suggests that audience awareness is important in deciding which moves may be obligatory and, perhaps, where innovation might be acceptable or even encouraged. What other factors might you consider when determining which moves will be effective in the genre you are writing?
4. Think about a time when you felt like you had to bend or transform the conventions of a genre in order to achieve your purpose. How did you make choices about which moves or conventions were necessary to keep, and which could be adapted?
5. Gather a few samples of a genre from a discourse community you belong to and conduct a brief moves analysis. What is the action this genre carries out and how do the moves help it achieve that action? What can the common moves tell you about how structure and language create and reflect this community?
6. Some genres tend to be more open to variation than others, including in their use of moves. Make a list of genres that you think are more open to variation and those in which bending the norms may be riskier. What kinds of things might affect your choices as a writer to depart from common moves or other features of a genre?

Teaching Resources

3. Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking)

by Janet Boyd

Author’s 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.

Discussion Questions

1. Which of the exercises did you find easiest to write? Why?
2. Which of the exercises did you find hardest to write? Why?
3. What does the rhetorical situation of academic writing demand? Who is the audience? What tone is appropriate? What jargon might be needed? What information might be included and/or rejected in an academic paper?

4. Weaving Personal Experience into Academic Writing

by Marjorie Stewart

Author’s 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.

Discussion Questions

1. Marjorie Stewart claims that our minds are filing cabinets of stories. Do her stories, or the stories of her students, remind you of stories of your own? How does this chain of stories help us make sense of our experiences?
2. Has there ever been a time when you wanted to include personal experience in a writing project but were discouraged or forbidden to by an instructor? Why did you feel the story was important? What might have motivated the instructor?
3. Are their personal stories you are eager to include in an essay? What about stories that you would be uneasy revealing? How do you, and how do other writers, decide which stories they wish to share?
4. Work with an essay, either assigned in class or one you are familiar with in which the author uses personal experience. Compare it to an article on the same topic with no personal writing. Which do your respond to more, and why? Does the personal writing help you understand the writer, or does it get in the way of your intellectual understanding of the topic?

Teaching Resources

5. Why Blog? Searching for Writing on the Web

by Alex Reid

Author’s 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.

Discussion Questions

1. How does Reid’s discussion of audience, purpose, and genre help you better understand the rhetorical decisions involved in blogging?
   Reflect on how these same considerations apply to other writing tasks you’ve encountered in school, work, or social media.

2. Reid argues that blogging supports intrinsic motivation for writing.
   In what ways might having more freedom over content, tone, and timing change the way you approach writing? How might this affect your engagement with academic or professional genres?

3. What do you think distinguishes a blog from other types of writing you’ve done?
   Based on Reid’s description, identify at least one rhetorical feature (such as voice, structure, or audience engagement) that seems unique to blogging.

4. If you were to create your own blog, what would its purpose, audience, and genre conventions look like?
   Try outlining a few rhetorical choices you might make—such as your tone, the types of posts you’d write, or how you’d design your site—to match your goals.

6. Punctuation’s Rhetorical Effects

by Kevin Cassell

Author’s 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.

Discussion Questions

1. This chapter encourages you to read both visually and aurally so that you see and hear how punctuation functions in writing. Is this kind of reading something that comes easily to you, or do you have to work at it? Do you think it’s possible to read for entertainment or information at the same time that you are paying attention to the look and sound of writing?
2. Some writers who “listen” to writing acknowledge the role punctuation plays in making texts appeal to the ear. Theodor Adorno, a 20th century philosopher, compared punctuation to music (300). The writer Lynn Truss claims that “punctuation directs you how to read, in the way musical notation directs a musician how to play” (20). What do you think about this analogy? What else might you compare punctuation to, and why?
3. In this chapter, the author re-punctuated a two-sentence expression (“They didn’t mislead. They flat-out lied.”) three ways. A famous philosopher, Rene Descartes, summed up his thinking with a famous axiom “I think, therefore I am.” (His original phrase, in Latin, is “cogito, ergo sum.”) Go online and find out what “I think, therefore I am” means philosophically, then think (or talk with your peers) about how the single comma used in the original translation helps to express that idea. Afterwards, re-punctuate this expression in three or four ways so that it has three distinctly different voices and contexts. What would be the “philosophy” of each expression? Have fun with this one.

Teaching Resources

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

by Amy Cicchino

Author’s 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.

Discussion Questions

Reviewing the Chapter’s Content

1. Review the key rhetorical concepts that the author uses in this chapter. Which concepts are familiar to you and which are new? How do you see these concepts at work in the writing you’ve done for this course?
2. In your opinion, is the scenario that opens and closes this chapter realistic to writing assignments in other courses? What challenges related to how you understand writing in your discipline are understated or missing? What do you wish the author had considered or added when creating the opening scenario?
3. The author has a list of writing strategies that she encourages you to consider. In looking over this list, which strategies complement your writing process? Which strategies do you think would be more difficult to integrate into your writing habits?

Reflecting as a Writer

1. The author mentions the role that failure and frustration plays in adapting to new writing situations. Think about a particular time you felt frustrated by a writing situation: what did you do? How did you overcome the challenges? What would you have done differently? How did this past challenge prepare you to better respond to future writing-related challenges?
2. In reflecting on your future professional community, identify some writing situations (purposes, audiences, genres, and forms of rhetoric) that are commonly used in that community. What do you know about these writing situations? If you were to engage in these situations as a writer, what questions would you need answered to be successful?
3. Open an internet search and type in “Writing in …” completing the phrase with your future professional or disciplinary community. Take 10–15 minutes to review some resources that come up. Then, do some freewriting about what you found: what resources did you find, and do you believe they reliably represent writing in your future profession? What organization or individual created these resources, and are they good authorities of writing in your discipline? What did you learn about writing in this professional community? How is this approach to writing different than writing you have done? What excites you about writing in these new ways? What do you want the writing you do in your profession to accomplish?

Teaching Resources