John Martinez's Chapter 1 Review

The first chapter of this book is unfortunately quite dull. It's certainly informative, but as I read on, it becomes increasingly dry, bland, and lackluster. This is not really the fault of the text, as the reason for it being so dull is my knowledge on the subject. I have a fair amount of experience writing from school and my spare time, so most of what the chapter was about is common knowledge for me. Regardless, going through everything it was talking about was a decent refresher. What was certainly new to me was how the book defined genres. When I think of genres, I typically think of things like fiction, non-fiction, horror, comedy, tragedy, etc. However, the way the book defines genres is things such as the five-paragraph essay and the term paper. To me, these were not genres, they are formats for an overall genre, these being typically non-fiction. I'm still not sure I would call these genres in my personal time or writing, but for the sake of learning, these are genres. Rhetoric, Purpose, and Audience are fairly obvious topics with not much to really say other than a writer must consider a works genre and material to best appeal to a potential audience and how best to realize this in their writing. Modes and Media were certainly new to me, I had never heard these terms being used like they were in the book. To me, Media was simply how something was delivered to an audience, whether it was via books, films, poetry, etc. Breaking it down into the mode of how a reader experiences something, whether it be text-based, visual, and audio and separating it from media is different. I don't dislike these breakdown, though it feels like it makes it too unnecessarily complex, especially since I have never heard someone else use these terms before in this context. The rest of the chapter deals mostly with design and style in writing, with nothing really new for me there. It hit on the same old points, these points being tone, voice, genre elements and how to use them, as well as the design an author uses in their writing. I personally wish sources had its own chapter or at the very least a longer section since this is arguably the most important part of the chapter due to the necessity of sources in traditional college writing. Overall, the chapter had some good information in it but it was fairly dull and uninteresting to me since I knew most of what was being talked about already.