ENGL 324 (Spring 2018) Writing the Radio Essay

Genre is something that we are all semi familiar with. We hear about different television genres all the time as well as books. What I learned from the article Genre in the Wild is that genre can be so much bigger than that and as writers we do genre writing all the time in our daily lives even the example of Snap Chat stories came up in the article. I think what we do in this class of Radio Essay is a great way to extend our knowledge of genre and blending different genres together. For example we are doing this class as part of our academic portfolio which academic work is part of genre but in our academic work we have included a narrative essay with is a subgenre and mixed it with radio, music, interviews and all sorts of new things which can all be split up into their own genres which also have their own subgenres. I think what I basically picked up in the article is that genre writing and being able to combine them is like being able to use a different tool set and using those too...

The "Genre in the Wild" article was both interesting and helpful to me in piecing together the experiences I have had this semester as I have moved into a new genre category. I think we all have had to learn to occupy a new genre and identify genre situations as proposed in the article. The first thing that stuck out to me in the article was this quote about genre situation, " The scientist doesn’t have to figure out whether she’ll write a report or if she’d rather write a song lyric. The Supreme Court justice writing for the majority knows that she will not write a haiku. In each instance, the situation calls for a particular genre. The writer in the situation knows this. So the writer takes up the genre and uses it to respond." For this class and the assignments included with it, I have had to compete with years of conditioned formal and critical writing. One of my biggest shifts in this semester was in realizing that the radio essay was at its core storytelling ...

In thinking about the idea of genres, genre sets, and genre ecosystems, I’d argue that the radio essay is perhaps more mysterious as a genre than some of the more typical, written-style genres out there. Take the doctor’s form used in Bickmore’s article – the fact that it usually asks uniform, consistent questions, and acts as a record for the patient as well as a legal document. Even essays have standardized headings, the typical five-sentence paragraphs, introductions, hooks, conclusions, etc… When we can comment on the merits of these essays, we usually approve of specificity. This concrete example here, or a cited statistic there. Even journalistic genres have very specific rules – the who, what, when, where, and how, for instance. Yet, with the radio essay, it always seemed quite a challenge to nail down the specifics of the genre system. You have the story, the “trouble”, perhaps some music cues, maybe some sound effects if you want. But it’s not required. Even when d...

Did the radio essay behave like a genre in the way the essay described? The highlighted definition in the essay was  “A genre is a typified utterance that appears in a recurrent situation.   A genre evolves through human use and activity to be a durable and usable form for carrying out human communicative intentions in fairly stable ways.” The radio essay is its own category, like music or books or poetry or television. It holds its own set of characteristics and language that happen over and over again using different topics.  The whole idea of genres is rather interesting, and for me, a bit overwhelming. I typically think of genre as something to keep in the scholastic setting, but the essay we read made me realize the social media writing is a genre, texting, journal writing, all of it is its own genre as well as the ones we see in class. To be able to know without thinking about it which genre to choose depending on which context you are in. It was different in this ...

Back in high school, when we all had to apply to colleges and choose our prospective majors, I was drawn to writing due to the lack of rules. I would always tell people that writing is fluid which means you can do whatever you want. Nothing is right and nothing is wrong. But college has changed my perspective on that a little. Genres in writing are a powerful thing. They teach us to use our words with precision and formality in order to convey a stronger, clearer message for our audience. Without genre, writing would be incredibly dull and I doubt people would do it for fun. Bickmore offers the concept that all writers bring their own adaptations to a genre each time they sample it, which continues to exemplify my original opinion on writing, even within specific and formal genres. This class has taught me a lot about genre, but what was most exciting was learning how adaptable I am as a writer. Although I am no professional, I was astounded with my ability to create cohesive essay...

This final project really felt like it pushed me more than the previous two, and I really felt like this format was more true to the radio essays I had heard in the past. The other projects felt like they were in familiar territory, albeit with different technology, but the final project felt very foreign and challenging to me. I really had to change how I approached the writing process when I made this project. Writing the first two essays was what I was  used to more or less. Just dealing with text I had written and revising that based on feedback wasn't too far from other classes aside from revising for sound. The last project forced me to write around the organic conversations I had recorded. I felt like I had to give up a lot of control of the final project and just try to write for the needs of the piece rather than writing to achieve some goal I had in mind before the interviews. I'm planning on revising this piece for my portfolio because I think I can improve my narr...