Shin, Joseph

Ghasedi
English 131
14 December 2015
Short Assignment 2
Genre 1: A Tweet

Genre 2: Teen Magazine Article

So in the news lately theres been this dude. His name is Bashar, and he is the leader of a
little country in the Middle East called Syria. But he isnt some good dude. This guy is a
complete savage, and not in a good way. Because of him a whole lot of people have died and
even more have no place to live anymore; the situation there is not looking good.
On top of that, there are these rich dudes who think that they know everything. Famous
thinkers like Slavoj iek, Jrgen Habermas, and Peter Singer all have giant sticks up their
butts; they offered a pretty horrible take on the situation. See, these dudes are not the nice and
sweet kinds of old people; they are like the super crabby ones who yell at you when you skate by
them. And what they said was that all of these poor people who are running for their lives
basically dont deserve any help from. Remember the old days, with segregation and all the bad
jazz? Well these guys are kind of like that because they dont see the poor homeless refugees as
people like them.
Now you might be asking, why are these old dudes so not cool? Well there are a few
reasons that these guys are no bueno. First of all, they went to a lot of school. Boring right? Yeah
completely right because the schools they went to taught them all sorts of boring stuff. Stuff like
how smart they are compared to the rest of us. Stuff like how only they are allowed to give
suggestions to the world and we are just supposed to listen.
Do you want to know what the worst part is? All of these supposedly super smart dudes
are the ones who are supposed to be offering us solutions. But instead they are just showing us
how smart they are and how inferior the rest of us are. Not cool.
So youre probably wondering, what do I do? Well heres what you should do. Dont
believe everything you see on TV. I know I sound like some boring old hippy, but what I have to

say is real important. You have to read, read and read. Explore the world and make sure the
world you see, is the worldview you developed by yourself. And one day, you may be the one to
show the world the truth.

Writers Memo
The genres I chose were a Twitter post and an article from a teens magazine. For my
tweet I made several conscious rhetorical choices. My tweet was aimed towards the older,
postgraduate adult population of twitter; therefore I used many words common in the vernacular
of higher education. While my tweet was informal in the sense it lacked punctuation or any
formal convention, the words themselves were not informal and colloquial. In assembling my
tweet I tried to create a statement with language that, with proper convention, could appear in a
formal academic paper or textbook. In terms of my teen magazine article, the rhetorical choices I
made were quite the opposite of the tweet. The magazine was aimed towards teens so my
language was very conversational. I did not use any big academic terms, but rather I stuck to a
vocabulary of a middle school level. For my tweet, the only genre convention I really utilized,
aside from the brevity and lack of punctuation, was the hashtag. I used a hashtag because in
order for my message to be widespread, I had to create a catchy phrase that could encompass my
message. While my hashtag was fairly vague, in the context of my tweet it does convey my main
ideas quickly. With my magazine article, I did not use any real formal conventions. I started
sentences with and and asked questions directly to the reader. The conventions I did utilize
were that of a very informal conversation with a teen. My two genres/audiences were practically
polar opposites. My tweet was aimed towards an educated populace who probably are already
aware of the problem I presented. My magazine article targeted teens who had little to no
knowledge of the Syrian conflict nor the elitism in academia, although that is because they
havent progressed to that point yet. Overall, I found writing the magazine article most
challenging. The original article was very complex and while I was dumbing it down I kept
worrying about losing some of the articles message and not faithfully preserving the content.

However, I do think that both of my pieces fit their genres very well in terms of general
rhetorical choices and conventions; but I do believe that my magazine article could include more
depth and straight information from the source article.

Article: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/refugee-crisis-europe-zizek-habermas-singergreece-syria-academia/