University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Engagement with Genres Discussion

Investigating our Engagement with Genres

As our syllabus states:

In this unit and writing project, we will investigate – and perhaps challenge – our own assumptions about our wildly idiosyncratic writing processes. In 8-10 pages, you will draw on various exploratory protocols (drawing, read-aloud/think-aloud, genre analysis) to examine a piece of writing from this course, tracing its development, and the social actions around its development. You will showcase your findings as you see fit.

In class I mentioned that our goals for this unit are:

1)To understand your situated “uptakes” of writing assignments;

2)To understand the ways that acting with prior genre knowledge (like the various “types” of writing you’ve been asked to write over your academic and personal lives) influences your use of genres in the present.

This is an assignment aimed at helping you think about and understand how you engage with writing, particularly around genres of writing. I think it works interestingly because, as you know by now, the assignments I create do not necessarily call for a particular genres. Nonetheless, as you write various pieces for this course, you inevitably draw on genres of writing you have used in the past in various ways. It is your job to find those various parts, shed light on them, and maybe think about where they come from, where you learned them, how you use them in recurrent ways as responses to writing situations. This last sentence asks how you, dear student, genre (as verb).

To these ends, you will write a text that follows from an analysis of your two research protocols (drawing and RATA). You should look at both the text you used as artifact of the social processes of engaging with a meta-genre (assignment prompt), and your processes of responding to it (which would hopefully have been explained by your drawing protocol and to an extent, maybe your RATA).

I strongly suggest, in your analysis of your chosen text and the protocols you performed with your text, that you draw heavily from the course texts we’ve used – the various theories of genre we’ve focused on are your friends, here, and they will help you in various ways to explain what you think is going on in your writing. Particularly, I think, looking back to Paré and Smart’s text Observing Genres in Action (week 4 on Moodle!) and using their framework to look at your text will help. From their chapter, you could make use of “regularities in textual features” (p. 123-124) to explain how your text is typified; you could make use of “regularities in social roles” (p. 124-125) to describe the social life of the genre and your participation with it, where it comes from, the power relations around it, etc.; and, you could use “regularities in composing processes” (p. 125-126) – in conjunction with your drawing protocol – to explain your idiosyncratic writing processes. Paying close attention to what Bawarshi and Reiff (2010) and Bawarshi (2016) say about uptake both generally, but also as an individual phenomenon, will be interesting, too. But, as always, if your research on your engagement with genre and writing processes leads you elsewhere, feel free to take it wherever you like!

Here is a list of questions that you might answer in the production of Writing Project #4:

1)What did your drawing protocol show about your processes, broadly?

2)What did your drawing protocol show you about your processes for writing the particular text you chose?

3)Drawing on your transcript of the RATA, what sorts of things came up when you thought-out-loud about your goals, context(s), and habitual writing processes?

4)Drawing from your transcript of the RATA, what sorts of things came up as you thought-out-loud about the five facets of the RATA:

-Parts of the text where you were trying to “do” the genre of the assignment prompt

-Parts of the text that seem to be in line with your habitual, “genred” ways of writing or responding to writing prompts (uptaking writing/writing prompts)

-Meanings you see in the text (that you were trying to convey)

-Meanings you see differently now

-Influences about genre present in the text (from other reading or writing, thinking or talking with others, etc.)

5)What does your data from both protocols tell you about your engagement with genres, broadly?

6)What does your data from both protocols tell you about your engagement with genres, specifically?

7)What did you learn from your partner’s drawing and RATA protocols?

8)How might you use what you know about your engagement with genres in the future?

* You do not have to answer all of these questions, but they should give you the start you need to draft the Writing Project.

You may use your drawings as figures in your text (I hope you do) as you explain what you found; you should use quotes from your RATA protocol transcript as documentable claims supporting you’re the points you’re making about your research on your engagement with genres. Doing both of these things will contribute to the overall length of your text, hence why it is our longest Writing Project.

There is no form, structure, or set approach I expect you to take in drafting this assignment. Go with whatever works for you and the data you generated. A general piece of evidence is to analyze your data before drafting, and find what your data tells you, or suggests, about your engagement with genres. This can be made into a controlling purpose that you support in varied ways through your data.