EXPLORING THE GENRE I: Follow-up

By and large, your findings about the essays were on the money, although there were instances of confusion on what constituted "field," "tenor," and "mode" (we'll talk about it again later). Some groups came up with multiple writer goals, which illustrates an important point--that quality writing is able to get more than one thing done at a time, and that a skilled writer will always try to get multiple things done with one text. It was surprising, though, that there was little mention of two of the most important goals of topic proposals written by students that would be read by their instructors:

1. to convince the instructors that the chosen topic is worthy of study for an entire semester, and
2. to get the best grade possible

Whenever you examine any text, either by itself or as an example of a particular genre, think beyond what's explicitly written on the page/screen. This goes for tenor, as well as for field: the people involved aren't only the people mentioned in writing. They are the writer(s), the reader(s), and sometimes people who would be effected by actions taken by audience members after reading the writing.

You'll do this kind of analysis for the other three projects in the coming months. When you do, don't get bogged down in the details of individual essays--look for the commonalities. Remember that you're exploring an entire genre and making hypotheses about the norms of that genre as a whole, and not about individual instances of it. Knowing how an entire genre works is going to be much more helpful to you and to your fellow writers in the long run.