ENGL 324 (Spring 2018) Writing the Radio Essay

What I have learned about genre and writing from this class is that with each new genre you have to take your base writing style and let it be a cat. A cat has many forms, the long skinny stretch, the fat blob, the almost liquid state of fitting in that small box that seemed impossible it get into. You have to determine what kind of cat it needs to be and let it become that. For this particular genre of radio essay, I had fun learning new ways of writing. I write poetry usually, specifically poetry that is meant to be read out loud. I play with sound all the time, but usually just the sound of words. It was really nice to have a chance to play with sound in other ways as well. Where I didn't need to write out what a melancholy piano would sound because I could just use it to inform the piece instead as a background sound. experimenting with layers of sound and finding external sounds to fit into the words I was writing was a challenge but a fun change of pace that really made this...

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...

I think that this article is pretty relevant to the work that we did this semester. The radio essay is certainly its own genre, and I think that what we've done with our projects reflects this. As we established early on, there's a difference between writing a piece for reading, and writing a piece so it can be listened to. There are different requirements for the process of writing (usually there's a script and a recording), different formatting requirements (who needs a header or page numbers?!), so in short, yes, the situation absolutely determines the form, making the radio essay its own sort of genre. It's interesting, because I feel like I was already familiar with this genre before this class. I'm an avid NPR listener, so I was no stranger to radio essay shows like Snap Judgement or This American Life, but I never thought about what makes this genre different from a normal essay, other than the medium it's presented in. Even as someone who tries to writ...

At the beginning of the semester, I would have been hard pressed to call the Radio Essay a separate genre from Creative Non-Fiction. However, at the beginning of the semester, I also would have been hard pressed to actually describe a radio essay. Such was my ignorance coming into this class.  I have come to think of the radio essay not so much as a separate genre entirely, but rather as a distinct sub-genre of creative non-fiction, complete with its own rules and conventions. Much the same as Fiction, Non-fiction and Poetry have their own sub-genres of their own. This understanding has given me a greater appreciation for genre thinking and has shown me that no genre is exactly as cut and dried as some would have us believe.  Working in within the medium of the radio essay has definitely broadened my understanding of the author/audience relationship, as well as the emphasized need to be as concise as possible in my writing. These ideas are not new to me, but the nature of...

I really agreed with the idea in "genre in the wild" that genre isn't static. I have been struggling recently to help a friend with a paper that is academic in style but about pop music and it is difficult to find sources that are traditionally academic about one specific band. The way to address this, in my mind, is not to switch topics but rather look at academic papers on music as a whole and use rolling stone and other music magazines as sources. Any paper you write will stretch trying to encompass concerns of topic, audience, genre, and median of publishing

The Radio Essay Genre was something I was completely new too. I didn't even know what a radio essay was when I began this class, scratch that, I didn't even know what it was when I signed up for the class! Now as the semester is ending, I am so happy that I took this class and was able to discover this new genre and will further utilize the tools and tricks that this genre provided me with. Within the article, "Genre in the Wild", there is a small passage that states, ". . . any system of genres is also a part of the system of activity happening in any writing situation. This means that understanding the genres operating in any setting will also help you to understand better what happens in that setting."  I feel that this passage can really relate to what I learned about the radio essay genre because the genre of radio essay pulls together a few forms of other genres forming a system where it can work in any setting. A radio essay feels like a combination...

The first moment I heard the "radio essay" being used to describe a genre provided a pure sense of confusion. Up until this point I was accustomed to hearing the "normal" genres such as creative nonfiction or science fiction. Over the course of each project, I didn't see any drastic changes in the writing process, however, the editing process and compiling the audio file were the most notable differences. This new genre worked to a certain extent for me. I still don't like listening to myself speak on a recorded file, nor do I think I successfully achieved the skills necessary to properly compiling an audio file on Audacity. I have a newfound enemy; its name is Audacity. I have always had technological issues and Audacity only highlighted these shortcomings. The transitions and planned out pauses combined with the task of adding music and ambient noises lead to my unhappy attitude towards my own pieces. Radio essays required a lot more structure and ...

Genre Post For example, did the radio essay behave like a genre in the ways the authors describe?   How has your experience made you "sensitive to genre," and what have you learned about it that you can apply in other writing situations? The most notable aspect of genre learning that came from this course for me was actually the lack of adaptation I thought was needed to transform my written word to spoken. I have always written much like I was transcribing an internal monologue and while this may be a weakness when it comes to traditional writing I saw it as a boon in radio writing. For example, the transitions, cues, and pauses needed to construct a radio essay were already trying to be expressed in my normal writing, often marked by an overuse of commas. Furthermore, I always read all of my essays out loud to myself to see if they 'sound' good, so audio was the primary way I interfaced with my own work to this point. That said, I did notice where this...

Initially, I bristled whenever I heard the radio essay described as a genre. At best, I thought, it is a subcategory of creative nonfiction. When I sat down to write my first two projects for this class, the writing process felt no different than the work I've done before, even though it has the additional technical bells and whistles. Despite the amount of time we talked about genre in class, I didn't start to think about it seriously until this last documentary piece. Part of this new level of understanding has to do with what the radio essay isn't. While the same reflective voice is the well for a lot of creative nonfiction, writing that is intended for reading can be experimental, and eschew a natural structure. I'd argue that the best of it still has a clear SOFT, well defined trouble, and--while you need to get to it faster on the radio--a compelling hook. But it's a lot muddier. That is to say, I found that I had to be a lot more precise when working on the...