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Jing Lan
Writing 2
Professor Wilson
WP01
Who Moves My Genre?
Do you believe that there are several ways to express the same topic? Have you
ever read two totally different format texts, which have almost the same meaning?
What makes them different? The vocabularies, tones or even numbers of letters can
make them very different from each other. Even a same topic can have several
different genres according to what goal this text tries to achieve, and what kind of
audience they face. Different genres then help us reach the different rhetorical
purpose, which is the factthat these texts will finally bring to the specific audience.
Three most important elements, which decide what our texts will look like, are the
tone of the text, the potential audience that we face and the purpose of writing the
specific text. I will analyze what make two non-academic texts which have same topic
become different

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genres in the following paragraphs by using these three elements. If you need to
describe a refrigerator, you will describe it in different ways. Whats the difference
between refrigerators advertisement and customer review? Lets see two examples of
a refrigerator from these two genres:
Introducing the Samsung French Door Refrigerator. It is our biggest refrigerator
having 32 cubic feet to fit all of your life needs. No need to stack food and risk
everything falling out when you go to the Fridge. Finally Samsung has a refrigerator
that fits even the biggest family. Or the small family that likes to plan ahead and take
fewer trips to the Grocery Store. So add French doors to your kitchen. By Samsung.
I purchased this frig at Home Depot, but still stay away from this frig. The tech
has been out to the house three times and can't fix the water leaking out of the freezer
part. Plus the ice machine still doesn't work. The Samsung tech support has been
nothing but close to worthless, when you call them they ask you the same question
over and over again.
Why is it really important to clarify about whom you are writing to before you
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begin to write anything? Because it can decide the tone you use to write. Audience
can determine the type of language used, the formality of the discourse, the medium
or delivery of the rhetoric, and even the types of reason used to make the rhetors
argument(Carroll, 50). Just like the advertisement is facing all kind of potential
buyer, so they need to be very general. The wider range it coveres, the better the effect
will be. Back to the advertisement that I showed before, it introduces the advantages
of their product for both big family and small family. Its a good advertisement
because it gives all kind of families a reason to buy their refrigerator. Thats the
importance for why we need to know our audiences. For the customer review, we all
know that the kind of person who is most likely to read the review are the potential
buyers. Whose advice do we want to hear from when we decide to buy something? It
is the person who had bought the same product. What we most want to hear from
them is their personal experiences of using this specific product. Thats why not like
advertisements; customer review is better when it is specific. More details can help
the potential buyers make a better decision.
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People can tell which genre the author used by the tone. I imagine that you
would probably not share a risqu joke with your mom, sent a Hey Buddy email to
your professor, or update your Facebook status as X has a huge wart on his foot.
(Dirk, 253). We can easily tell the first text is the advertisement and the second one is
a customer review. But how do we do that? Advertisements always use some
elaborate or grand vocabularies to describe their products like biggest. The tone of
advertisements is always convincible, motivational and even exaggerated You cant
objectively know both the advantages and disadvantages about their products since
the goal for advertisements is to convince you to purchase. However, reviews always
use more simple words, instead of large vocabularies. Moreover, They are specific
and have their own experiences. We can see that the customer review use more
personal tone like I, we instead of you. It make you feel like is your friends
who told you about their feeling about this product. While advertisement use a
convincible tone to convince you to buy their products, customer review is more
truthful and sounds reliable when you are considering to buy something.
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When we write an advertisement, what we want is to sell our products as much as

we can. When we write an academic essay, we want to get high grades. When we
write a short note, we try to express ourselves as clear as possible in just few words. A
clearly understand of the goal you want to achieve by writing a text decide what genre
you will use. Just like the customer review, we can see that the author is trying to say
this refrigerator is not good. When he tried to say that and post it on the website, we
can infer that his goal is to stop the potential buyer to buy this product. How does he
achieve this goal? While he was trying to say that this product is bad, he used lots of
specific examples. He indicated three problems that this refrigerator has. The tech
has been out to the house three times and can't fix the water leaking out of the freezer
part, plus the ice machine still doesn't work, and when you call them they ask you
the same question over and over again. These three problems show people that the
refrigerator he bought cannot be fixed by the tech after so many trials and the
customer service is not helpful. Will we buy this product after we see so many
specific examples of how bad this refrigerator is? Definitely not, which means he
successfully achieved his goal.

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Same as the advertisement, since the goal of any commercials is clearly trying to
convince their potential buyers to purchase, the refrigerator advertisement shows all
the advantages of their fridge and gives every families a reason to buy it at the same
time.
Who moves the genres? What make advertisement and customer review different
from each though they almost have the same potential audiences? While
advertisements use motivational tone to achieve the only goal it have: convince you to
buy their products; customer review use more specific experiences to rather convince
or stop you to purchase. However, they do have something in common that we need to
think about every time before we write any kind of texts. First, a clear understanding
of whom we are writing to, then this helps us to set a tone to talk to this specific group
of person. Finally, we use this tone and try our best to achieve the goal, which is why
we want to write this text to this group of people.

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Work Cited
Dirk, Kerry. "Navigating Genres." 249-262.
(http://wac.colostate.edu/books/writingspaces1/dirk--navigating-genres.pdf)
Carroll, Laura Bolin. "Backpacks v. Briefcases." 45-58.
(http://wac.colostate.edu/books/writingspaces1/carroll--backpacks-vs-briefcases.pdf)