It's all about the genre

One activity we did during the week was learning about genre in our Chapter 2 reading assignment, from the textbook The Anteater's Guide to Writing and Rhetoric. Although we have had multiple reading and annotating assignments, this one hit a bit differently. Last week I wrote about how a big objective of this class was to identify the rhetoric of different writing genres, and this week we dove deeper into that field.

Here is one of the many learning objectives in this class regarding genre:

• Apply key concepts related to genre and rhetorical situation, including convention, discourse community, purpose, context, audience, and ethos.

Click here to read them all!

From this activity, I was able to follow this learning objective precisely. When it came to genres and rhetorical situations, I highlighted and annotated the text in ways that I thought I could collaborate with it. I was able to start and continue a few conversations regarding the text with my academic discourse community. After breaking down the context and audience of the chapter, I was able to further elaborate on the genre and rhetorical situation.

Here are a few things I learned while reading this chapter:

• how to identify the context of a text

• how to identify genre conventions

• how genre evolves in new contexts

• what is "form and mode?"

Here is a screenshot of one of my annotations from Chapter 2 of The Anteater's Guide to Writing and Rhetoric.

I am demonstrating that I am strengthening my skill of breaking down texts and looking to find a deeper meaning in them. While I was reading about academic discourse communities, I found that I had been a part of them for so long, without realizing it. Finding deeper meaning of texts is crucial to my learning as it helps me find ways to improve my interpretation skills. Mastering this skill is crucial to my academic ethos. This means that I am building my credibility as a reader and writer, and this skill shows this because I am able to report every aspect of a given text. Although I have not mastered breaking down texts, I find myself growing in that category which is why I am confident, as a part of my discourse community, that I am increasing my academic ethos.