PB2B

Every author writes in a way that sets him or her apart from other writers. Every writer has a distinct writing style. Whether it is frequent use of dashes or anecdotes, there is always something that makes the writing different. These unique features are sometimes referred to as “moves”. Moves can be anything from miniscule things like never using the oxford comma, to very noticeable features such as only writing in a checklist format or capitalizing every first letter of every word. Whether we notice these things or not, they are there, and they make the piece of writing what it is – distinctive.

To further facilitate our understanding of moves, let’s compare two readings we have reviewed this quarter. More specifically, lets look at Shitty First Drafts by Anne Lamott and Navigating Genres by Kerry Dirk.

In Navigating Genres, Dirk discusses genres and what makes a genre a genre. He used the examples of country songs and satiric news articles to show us what distinguishes them from each other. He addresses his audience in first person and uses “I” quite a lot. He starts his essay off with an example of a joke, which effectively introduces what he will be discussing for the rest of the paper. Some prominent moves that I noticed Dirk use were the frequent use of bullet points to present more examples to the reader. For instance, he listed five bullet points just to provide several samples of country music conventions. Another move that I noticed Dirk used quite often was the use of citations from academic sources as an attempt to further help readers/writers understand genres. He cited Lloyd Bitzer on the topic of rhetorical devices, and said, “When something new happens that requires a response, someone must create that first response”. This is something that Shitty First Drafts does not do. Yet another move we see in Dirk’s work but not in Lamott’s is the use of example scenarios, such as in the case of the ransom note. Dirk gives us a potential situation, and then makes us decide which version of a ransom note would be most effective.

Just like Navigating Genres, Shitty First Drafts is written to motivate writers and help them make their work better. It is also written in a fairly informal matter. I mean, the title alone should get that point across. Lamott also addresses her audience directly, using “you” and “I”, and makes her writing seem as if she is speaking to us. She writes about her process of producing a food review and the drafts that came along with the process. In her writing, she uses quite a bit of humor, as well as anecdotes. “I used to write food reviews for California magazine before it folded.

(My writing food reviews had nothing to do with the magazine folding, although every single review did cause a couple of canceled subscriptions. Some readers took umbrage at my comparing mounds of vegetable puree with various ex-presidents' brains)”

 is a perfect example of Lamott’s moves regarding humor and informality. There is another move Lamott makes that concerns writing style. The way she wrote her work appears to be in an instruction-like format, making it easy for the reader to understand. Lamott’s Shitty First Drafts is more like short story that includes instructions, while Dirk’s is more like an explanation.

I’d say that both works have moves that make them pretty successful. Both writers wrote clearly enough for me to understand and pick out specific moves. But even though it was hard for me to choose the better one out of the two, I would have to go with Dirk’s Navigating Genres because I understood the essay and what he was trying to teach me the very first time I read it. Although Lamott’s moves did prove to be successful as well, Dirk’s use of frequent citations, bullet points, and example scenarios really did it for me.

PB2A

As college students, we often depend on scholarly articles to conduct research, write essays, or even study for tests. Rarely do we ever pay attention to what actually constitutes a scholarly article, however. In an effort to visualize the conventions of scholarly academic publications, I’m going to compare their features and conventions with those of SciGen products.

First of all, let’s revisit one of our beloved genre generators, the SciGen, and recall the conventions of SciGen’s mock research papers. What the generator produced were mock research papers. They seemed pretty legit — with a method section, language that appeared to be formal, research and introduction portions. Basically, if you were in a hurry and skimmed over the mock paper, you would probably not notice that the content is pure nonsense. Yet, if we compare the nonsensical paper that SciGen spewed out with a legitimate scholarly article or peer-reviewed journal, we will still find certain similarities.

Regardless of the content, scientific papers follow a certain format that distinguishes them from other works of writing. For starters, the names of all the people who contributed to the paper always appear at the top of the first page. The use of technical jargon still prevails and the language is very poised and formal, with a serious tone. Both also have introductions, sometimes called abstracts, which briefly describe the topic or experiment discussed in the paper. They are divided into sections or subtopics, with the labels usually determined by what is being discussed in the separated section. It is not uncommon to also find diagrams, drawings, or graphs in both academic publications and SciGen paper generations.

As for the differences, I’ll start with the obvious ones. Scholarly academic publications have legitimate, understandable content that focus on specific topics, such as butterfly distributions depending on climate. Whereas topics for SciGen papers just have a string of big words that make no sense when put together. Another obvious difference is that scholarly articles tend to be much longer, with the content of each subtopic exceeding the two or three paragraph limit that is so often found in the fake science papers.

The intended audience, at least to me, was a bit of a gray area. What I have come to understand is that both works are targeting the audience of people who specifically seek out scientific articles. Legit scholarly articles would, in my opinion, would deviate a bit because although they target a larger group of people who are looking for an unambiguous piece of writing, the access to them is limited compared to the general public since to read certain articles, one must access them though either a university portal, or have some other key. As for SciGen, all one needs to do, regardless of affiliation, would be to simply type in the website and generate a paper.

Another big difference between the two that I could not miss was that they had different purposes. While the role of academic publications was to inform students and assist them with research or whatnot, the only clear role for SciGen’s fake papers that I could distinguish was to show people how a scientific research paper might look like.

The aspects of the scholarly piece that struck me as most important were the intended audience and content of the paper. They are way more specific than SciGen’s. The piece is informative and targets a crowd of people who knew what topic they were looking for prior to finding the scholarly piece. I think those two aspects are probably the most important ones (at least to me) because when I search for scholarly articles, I prefer them to have as much info on the needed topic as possible so that I wouldn’t have to search for other ones. For example, when I looked up “butterflies and their environment” in the Academic Search complete, the result was pretty close to what I was looking for.

That’s what makes scholarly pieces important for me.

PB1B

As we continue to explore the features and types of conventions, let us take a look at some genre generators in order to aid with understanding how conventions relate to genres, what they are, and how they differ.  We will check out four genre generators — SciGen, a program that produces “research papers”, Pandyland, a comic strip generator, Memegenerator, which (surprise) generates memes, and a Fairytale Plot Generator.

When you click the “generate” button on its homepage, SciGen produces a mock research paper that looks legitimate but does not in fact make any scientific sense. So how do we know that the outcome is a research paper? All research papers have certain features that distinguish them from, say, an essay. For example, research papers usually have an abstract section in the beginning that summarizes the contents of the paper, including the thesis, process of experiment or research, and conclusion. Research papers have subtopic sections that are not typical to other genres of written work. Subdivisions differ depending on the topic of the paper. For example, one of the papers I generated dealt with “A Visualization of DNS” and included sections for the introduction, related work, methodology, implementation and a conclusion. Other conventions that help us understand that what we are looking at is a research paper are objects like graphs and algorithms.

Although comic strips usually don’t contain a great amount of words, we still know the genre they fall into. It is easy to tell just what Pandyland generates because the conventions of comic strips are easy to pick up on and recognize. First of all, comic strips are typically divided into panels, each depicting one scene. In this case there were only three panels, but the amounts vary based on lengths of stories. Next, comic strips don’t usually feature much text — a sentence per panel is usually the norm. A humorous tone is also a recurring component of comic strips, by which they are easily identifiable. Most importantly, what makes a comic strip a comic strip is the fact it contains drawings or pictures in each panel, without which the story would not be effectively told.

Most millenials are probably familiar with memes. Memes are images with captions written on them that are widely utilized by Internet users. They usually feature a recurring “character” such as Y U No man, Bad Luck Brian, or Success Kid, which are used depending on the situation described in the captions. Very often memes have a sarcastic or passive-aggressive tinge to them. Other times they are just plain funny and relatable, and sometimes they just don’t make any sense. It is easy to recognize memes because of their distinctive features. Typically, you’d see a character centered in the photo, usually on top of a funky background. There would also be text captions on top and on the bottom of the photo that complement each other. With the absence of one of either caption, the meme would not make sense.

As the last example for genre generators, I’d like to present Fairytale Plot Generator. The fairytale plot generator produces very short stories. A feature that makes it easy for the audience to determine that the generated product is a fairytale is that fairytales commonly involve make-believe, fantasy characters that we wouldn’t encounter in real life, such as dragons. The generator also presents the convention of the fairytale timeline — protagonist has multiple tasks or trials, protagonist encounters complications along the journey or completing said tasks, and protagonist finds luck and perseverance to finish tasks. Of course, there are also other smaller details that make fairytales what they are. There may be an antagonist, attempting to hinder the main character’s efforts, or a good companion to help the protagonist. Plots vary, but the basic fairytale layout does not.

After examining the previously mentioned genre generators and the conventions that come along with them, I’ve realized that most genres follow a specific schema, which essentially makes them what they are. What happens in these websites helps people better understand genres because of the repetitive format and features.

Facebook Statuses

We’ve all posted one at some point in our life. Facebook statuses have a variety of purposes, but their main purpose is to inform your friends, family, and acquaintances about what is going on in your life. For example, maybe you were admitted to the college of your choice, and in celebration, you choose to announce it through a status on Facebook. Or maybe your boyfriend broke up with you and you want to let people know that he hurt you by posting another status. In either case, statuses are there to help people share thoughts, ideas, announcements, or to simply say something funny.

Typically, statuses are not planned extensively. One usually decides whether they want to post a status just a few moments before they actually do it and the only thing that needs to be done prior to posting a status is to open Facebook, whether it be though a mobile app, or on the computer. Statuses are usually not formal. There is no set of rigid guidelines that determine whether a post can be classified as a status. Grammar and proper punctuation are not extremely important. You do not need a draft of any sort. A person simply opens Facebook, locates the status bar and writes whatever they happen to be thinking about. The content of a status can fall on a very broad spectrum ranging from the description of one’s day, to the announcement of a pregnancy. Whatever the context may be, the purpose of a Facebook status remains the same: to inform the people who know you about “what’s on your mind”. Seeing as that Facebook has privacy options, a person may regulate who can see the status. You may select your status to be open to anyone, or be seen only by a particular group of people, therefore regulating the audience for the reception of the status. For example, if you don’t want strangers reading your timeline, or having your mom find out about your wild weekend, yet still want to post a status about it, you may change your privacy settings.

The style and tone of a status may also vary greatly depending on the content.  The use of professional language or jargon while describing a situation, for example, may convey a more serious tone, while using improper capitalization and characters in place of certain letters may set a more dismissive tone. The length of a status can also influence the tone. When the targeted audience sees a large block of text, they might mentally prepare for a more serious post.

So what makes a status a status? Well, for starters, the input of text into the status bar at the top of one’s Facebook timeline. Another feature of a status is the use of a more relaxed language, in order for the wide audience to understand, relate and respond to the text. And lastly, the description of some kind of scenario or story. Regardless of how short the status is, it has to describe something for the audience to take away.