Thlog 1

This week in class, we explored exactly what makes a genre, a genre. We learned that, for every genre, there are very specific characteristics, called conventions, that make one genre distinct from another. I liked the specific example we used in class of letter of recommendation requests because I didn’t realize that genre could be so specific! I used to think of genre as something much larger and general, that many things would fall under. And while that still can be true, like for a research paper, we can (and should) get much more specific when defining genre. It was helpful to be able to talk through all of the conventions of a specific genre and go through different examples and see if they fit the conventions we came up with or not. I really agree with the response someone put up for our free writes about the reading. They referenced the reading’s point about how genres are continuously built off of one another over time, and I thought that was a really interesting idea that I had never really thought about. I really liked the example about how George Washington wrote the first State of the Union address and how every president since has referred back to that and previous addresses in order to construct their own. That genre now is slowly continuing to build, change, and grow with every new president in office. It’s a genre that didn’t exist before George Washington and now is a very important part of every American’s life. Even today though, there are new genres being created, especially as technology advances.

 Something that I was thinking about, that’s kind of dark but interesting and related to what I want to research later in grad school, is how these manifestos that are left after acts of mass violence have turned into a genre and I’d be curious to see what kind of conventions are in play there. Personally, as biopsychology major and hopefully a future researcher in the field, I think I could make some really interesting connections between the different conventions these people use and their psychological state. I think writing can tell you a lot about a person and their state of mind, and I think if you could look at all of the conventions that these people use, you could discover some patterns that could potentially help us understand why this type of violence is occurring in our society today and how to stop it.