Project Three

Project Three:

Genre Critique

Description:

In project One, you identified a particular (sub)genre--a category of Internet meme--and analyzed what formal features defined that genre. In your second project, you identified the different rhetorical situations that occur in different genres and the ways that an author adapted their argumentative strategies and writing styles to accommodate those genres. For this assignment, however, you are going to analyze a genre of your own choosing and argue for what you take to be the strengths and weaknesses of that genre as it affects different audiences.

Invention:

Since you will have to explain the conventions of the genre you select in great detail, it would make sense to choose a genre you are already interact with in some ways either because that genre is a popular one that most people have some interaction with and/or because you see an aspect of it that most people do not (for instance, one of the genres identified in your text, patient health information forms, should be familiar to pretty much everyone who has ever visited a doctor's office, but medical staff, for instance, are another, much smaller audience that engage with that genre on a much more frequent basis).  

Once you have chosen a genre, you should work toward providing a thick description of its formal features and the different uses made of that genre by different audiences. Focusing on these multiple uses will allow you to key on how that genre's strengths and weakness might appear differently to different users. This assignment is very closely tied to Chapter 7 of The Wayne Writer ("Critiquing and Changing Genres"), so (re)reading that chapter should be helpful here, as should the sample essays provided in that chapter (217-251).

Composition:

The sample essays, mentioned above, will also be useful resources for you in planning arrangement and structural strategies for this essay. One of the tricker aspects of this assignment may be the balancing the analytical and argumentative aspects of your objectives here (the two parts of "critique" mentioned in this project's title). You are going to be arguing for what you take to be strengths and weaknesses of a particularly genre, but those arguments will only be convincing to readers if they trust that you have provided a thorough and balanced analysis of the genre, its formal features, and its uses by multiple audiences.