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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Genre

Audio Ecosystems by Ben Wieland

My Nonexsistent Friendship with Audacity