Genres Gone Wild

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 write like they talk, I really didn't know what went into creating a piece for the radio. There's pacing concerns, vocabulary concerns, even rhythm to be considered. I think that this experience has made me more "sensitive to genre," in the sense that I think that in the future, I'll be more conscious of genre. Even if it is just a form at the doctor's office, there are definitely different requirements that go into every rhetorical situation, and it'll be interesting going forward to see if I'm able to d what we did with the ad copy, and mimic appropriate genres in all the writing I'll do.