Navigating Genres Response

This was the best thing that we have read for this class so far. I really enjoyed it and actually learned more about genres and their importance from this essay. The author clearly knew that their audience was a bunch of college kids because they actually made the whole thing easy to read and understand. They achieved their goal of informing us about how universal genres are through the combination of their genre and rhetoric in this essay. There were a bunch of examples that helped us to understand genres and kept the essay interesting. My favorite was the satirical titles from articles on the onion because they are all hilarious. The author showed us how persuasive writing can be with the examples of the ransom note and the letter for the credit card fee. These illustrated how manipulative writing can be. The direct language in ransom note serves to scare the hostage's family into paying the money. In the letter about the credit card fee, the author established their credibility as a past costumer and then suggested that they might take their business elsewhere is the fee is not fixed. This rhetoric convinced the bank to absolve the fee. The whole essay was about informing us how genres are used all around us all day. Not all pieces of work in a genre look the same, so sometimes it is difficult to distinguish which is being used. Genres range from positing on Facebook to writing an essay for class. Your writing changes depending on your audience. It made total sense to me when they talked about the changes in your academic writing depending on the teacher who will be grading it because I do that all the time. I do not usually think about writing as having an ultimate goal but everything we read has one. I like that the author wanted us to explore and learn multiple genres instead of mastering one.