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Erin Coggins
Dr. Rieman
UWRT 1103
September 8, 2014

Reading Response to Navigating Genres

1.

Reading this article on a tangible piece of paper helped me focus better because I
could literally trace the words on the page as I read them. This helped me to read
more efficiently and stay on task. I was also able to annotate and mark certain
rhetorical devices to remember later. It was a lot easier to write things down than
try to figure out how to highlight things online.

2. Kirk begins his essay explaining country music as a genre and what makes up
country music lyrics. This relation allows his audience to see genre in an
everyday situation. Then, Kirk explains how he decided how to set up his essay
by determining his audience and purpose for writing. This explanation allows us
to see that not every essay is formula driven, and understanding how to connect to
the audience to convey a certain purpose is an important aspect of writing. As
Kirk explains the origin and patterns of genre, he uses many quotes from genre
theorists and examples to provide evidence to back up his ideas. There is a casual
tone throughout the entire article, making the reading engaging and interesting.
Then, Kirk provided three various genres of ransom notes to show how diction
and style affect the purpose. He finishes out the essay with more quotes about
how students cannot possibly learn all of the genres they will ever need. Instead,

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he encourages genre awareness in order to successfully communicate through
writing in college and the work force.
3. I was really able to connect to the idea that I didnt have to think about audience,
or purpose, or even much about content for that matter. All that really mattered
was that essay followed a certain formula that was called good writing. But
looking back, what resulted from such formulas was not very good; actually, it
was quite bad (258). In high school, I was taught that a thesis has three parts,
each describing the topic of a main paragraph and to say an idea, explain it, and
say it again. While those are effective ways to write, I found myself trying to
write like that in all circumstances. This quotation emphasizes the importance of
audience and purpose in writing. I also liked the emphasis on origin when Kirk
says, But on a brighter note, genres also help us to make more efficient decisions
when writing, as we can see how people have approached similar situations
(259). I had not realized that most of the time, past writings tend to create genre.
We look to others who have written for the same situation and imitate their style,
diction, and syntax. Further, I thought it was interesting that Kirk writes, That is,
of course, not to say that there arent rules that come with genres; the difference is
that the rules change as the genre changes, that no rules apply to all genres, and
that genres require more effort than simply following the rules (258). This
relates back to the idea that no piece of writing is simply a set of rules or a
mathematic formula. It is intimidating and encouraging that writing has no rules,
only patterns. It gives a writer the liberty to write without being wrong, yet it also
gives guidelines to help the reception of ideas from an audience.

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4.

Three types of writing that have developed in the last five years include Twitter
posts, text messages, and Tumblr blogs. Twitter grants a writer 140 characters to
express their struggles, joys, frustrations, and happy birthday wishes. Some
twitter users are more sophisticated and grammatically correct than others, but all
users have the same 140-character format. Text messages have become one of the
most popular ways of communicating among the younger generation within the
last five years. Short, quick, and to-the-point messages are exchanged in a timely
fashion. Again, some texts are filled with abbreviations including ty, lylas
girly, and brb while others are more refined for spelling. Tumblr posts and
blogs have also become increasingly more popular. Tumblr includes many runons and not so many capitalized letters. In these forms of communication and
writing, casual tones are mainly used.