Genre Conventions

This week's learning objectives primarily covered genres and genre conventions. At first, I had no clue what a genre convention was, but throughout the discussions I became more and more familiar with this topic. When asked to report on a genre that we were familiar with, I chose to write about the music genre of hip-hop. At this point, I was not so familiar with the different genre conventions when it came to writing, but I luckily had the flexibility to write about something I was familiar with.

Here is what I wrote about on Tuesday of this week. I talked about how the beats and rhythms of the music are key conventions of hip-hop. A major learning objective of this class is to "define key course concepts related to genre, rhetorical situation..." as stated in the course learning objectives, and for this assignment it was the primary requirement to do just that. From this assignment I learned to seek different genre conventions that have to do with things outside of music. I am demonstrating my critical writing skills as I am required to report on something that I can show mastery of.

Showing that I can determine certain genre conventions is very important for academic ethos. It also shows that I am becoming an active member of an academic discourse community when I hear everybody else's favorite genre conventions. While reading my peers' responses, I was able to learn a few things about the different genres of writing that I was not as familiar with. My knowledge of the different genres of writing grew tremendously, and I hope that I did the same for my peers.

This is a picture of Albert Einstein, which is just about how smart I felt when I finished learning about everybody's take on genre conventions.

Later on in the lesson, we were asked to form groups of four. We were to discuss and report various reasons for writing, and also which genre of writing it would fall under. I was delighted to speak for the group when it was time to share, and I shared the following:

1. Reasons or situations for writing

   1. I want to apply to graduate school

2. Types of writing

   1. Writing application to the school

3. Explain and Identify

   1. When students want to apply to graduate school they fill out an application to the school which will be read by the application department. The student typically knows what the reader will want to hear (such as tone and topics) and will do their best to please the audience. A distinctive genre convention would be the proper grammar used in the application.

Without the help of my group, I would not have been able to explain nor identify the genre convention of a college application. By being a part of an academic discourse community, I was able to feed off of my teammate's ideas and report this to the class. This just goes to show how teamwork will always make the dream work.