Genre is the kind of writing that you are aiming for. A memo and an engineering proposal are both forms of writing but they are both different genres. Each genre has a different purpose in mind when it is sent to the audience and with this in mind the rhetorical elements that each genre focuses on are also different. This became more evident to me throughout the semester as none of the genre analyses I finished matched the ones prior.

In Figure 1, it shows the 4 different genres that we were expected to understand and then reproduce during this semester. Based on the syllabus alone each genre is inherently different structurally, just as their purposes are slightly different. While knowing that each genre is different is fairly easy I had trouble defining each characteristic for each genre as there is some overlap, but after doing multiple reflections I can slightly deconstruct each genre.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.