ENGL 324 (Spring 2018) Writing the Radio Essay

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...