What do I mean by genre & how to detect an informative genres?
Technically, today is Labor Day and most likely you are taking advantage of your time off, however, I didn't want to wait to post the lecture in the event that I have some overachievers in our class.
** DO NOT FORGET ** Mandates are due TOMORROW (Tuesday Sept. 3 before 11:59 pm). Your Mandate must follow the guidelines of last week's lecture, be a minimum of 500 words, and be posted directly to your Wix's About Me page. Publish and copy the link to your mandate. Upload that link to Canvas under Assignments and Mandate. If you are still struggling with Wix, go to Wix for Beginners. Read all the instructions and watch the video. (Pro tip, if the link to your Mandate has "editor.wix" in the link, I will not be able to access that link. After you click publish, a box should appear in the middle on the screen. That is the correct link.)
Next week, we are meeting in our first video conference.
First: Sign up for your meeting time! This link will take you to a Sign Up Genius Form. Make sure you don't wait until the last minute to sign up because I do not "make up" conferences and slots are limited.
Next: Don't forget your meeting time. Write it down once you book it.
At your meeting time, you must go to Google Hangouts and call me at bbradleyfsu@gmail.com. I DO NOT CALL YOU. YOU MUST CALL ME. If you cannot get through DM me on Twitter. Students have found that downloading the Google Hangouts app on their phone is more successful than using their laptop's video camera capabilities. Just make sure you call in from a place with strong Wifi (outside of Strozier Library is not strong Wifi).
You are taking a composition course. Composition is the act of combining parts or elements to form a whole. When you take a photo on Snapchat, swipe to the right geofilter, add text, and top it off with a bitmoji: that is a composition. You make compositions all day every day. Even scribbling a note on a Post-it is a composition. Genres are any composition’s kind category or sort. That’s pretty vague, but it is because genres are not solid. They are fluid. They can be multiple things. In the article Navigating Genres by Kerry Dirk, the author suggests that looking at genres is looking at the pattern, like a formula or a template. Horror movies are scary, but why? Usually because an uncontrolled entity wants the primary character to be dead. Chase scenes, murder weapons, looming presences: these are the essential elements of the horror movie, or what is known as Genre Conventions. Consider the many genres you are accustomed to seeing on our Netflix account. (Cerebral Crime Drama with a Strong Female Lead. Gross Out Christmas Comedy). In the bookstore genres are mystery, thriller, literature, horror, etc.
However, for the purpose of this class, we are going to think of narrow genres down to three large categories, then into smaller subgenre categories.
The three large genre categories are:
Informative
Persuasive
Narrative.
Why do I do this? Because you can apply these categories to any type of composition. Genres such as Horror, Thriller, Comedy, Pop, Rock, Rap, Historical Drama, Paranormal Romance: all these things are subgenres of the narrative genre. However, they can also be subgenres of informative genres or persuasive genres. But the purpose of an informative genre and the purpose of a persuasive genre are different from a narrative genre, which means they have different genre conventions.
To be certain of a composition’s genre, you must analyze it. You need to break it open like a dissection and poke around at what is inside.
When beginning an analysis, begin with the Mode. Mode is how you experience a composition. Mode are visual, audio or text based. For example, a song is an audio mode because it is experienced by listening. When performing a rhetorical analysis of a composition, which you will be asked to do for Project #2, Mode is the first step to that analysis. Once you determine how a composition is experienced, you will then ask yourself how it was possible you experienced it. That is Media.
Media is how you have access to a composition. This is either print, digital or face-to-face. If something is a digital composition, ask yourself, is it behind a paywall? If it is face-to-face, was there a ticket charge, like a concert? How large was the venue? If it was print, how did people see it? Was it hanging outside a high traffic area or placed inside a large group of people’s mailboxes? All of these media-related choices change the nature of the audience. Audience: who is looking at this composition? Age, income, education, gender, these should all be taken into account when analyzing a composition. If a composition is only accessible if someone pays for it, then that is a different audience than a free composition. If a print composition is only posted on FSU’s campus, what does that say about the audience? When you compose a text, the words you chose are very different depending upon the audience. Your best friend does not get the same text as a parent. Style and Design: What are the choices the composer makes to make their composition appeal to that audience? Fonts, bold, all caps, arrangement of photographs: all of these things contribute to the message of the composition. Rhetorical Appeals are tools which are used in order to evoke a connection to the viewer of the composition. These are also called the Aristotelian Appeals: Ethos, Pathos and Logos.
Ethos: Authority, credibility, reliability.
Pathos: human connection or emotion
Logo: logic
Purpose: Is it to inform, Persuade or tell a story (narrative)? An Inconvenient Truth’s purpose is to inform the audience about climate change. It is an informative genre. Crumb tells the true story of cartoonist R. Crumb. It is a narrative genre based on the facts of one person's biography. Both of these are documentaries, but they are different genres because they have different purposes. Can a composition be two genres? Absolutely. Some persuasive genres use narrative in order to be more persuasive. Some narratives are structures in a way that informs the reader about subjects they are not familiar, like the movie The Martian. These are hybrid genres. When identifying genres, play the percentages. If it is a hybrid, determine which genre is more dominant.
In Lloyd Bitzer’s The Rhetorical Situation, he suggests that all writing is persuasive. The act of holding onto one’s attention for the duration of the composition is persuasive. You are persuading a person to keep on until the end. Ever stopped watching a YouTube video because it suddenly got boring? Or stopped watching a TV show because the premise became too hard to follow or suddenly dumb? Did you have to unfriend someone from Facebook, Twitter or Instagram because they “got too toxic”? The composer of these genres neglected their appeals. Bitzer also explains that rhetoric requires appropriate responses for the situation. This is where he gets “rhetorical situation”: exigence, audience, constraints. Constraints can also be genre conventions, but constraints can also be money, technology, geography, politics and cultural climate.
Now, let's focus on Informative Genres
Informative genres is what you will primarily compose in this course. You will be researching and analyzing, then writing your findings into a document which should be easy for your reader to understand and comprehend. You will be taking on the role of teacher when composing these projects. Project #1 is a FORMAL INFORMATIVE genres. This is why I ask you to write in 3rd person. You cannot write in 1st person for this paper -- no I, no me, no we, no us. Anytime you use the word "I" on a composition, the focus of the composition is suddenly about who is writing the composition, not the subject of the composition. In Formal Informative Genres, you must make sure the focus of the composition is the subject, not the writer. Also, most of the writing you have completed up to this point has been 1st person writing. You already know how to do that.
In addition to many of the projects you will compose in this class, Informative genres also include but are not limited to:
News
reference articles
instruction manuals
pamphlets
flyers
recipes
patterns
infographs
Wikipedia entries
Peer Reviewed journal articles
Look at the above list and ask yourself which of the above list are formal and which are informal?How do you know if you are reading a credible informative genre?
This is trickier than it used to be. Information which comes off the internet runs the risk of looking credible, but being false. Sometimes people in one's social media circle will post articles which are not factual, and you might accept those articles as credible because you feel the person who posted it is credible. Don't trust that other people have assessed the article for accuracy. The retweet button is too easy to press. Think about click bait -- the "sponsored content" at the bottom of a website. Click bait links are usually advertisements in disguise. Other than being incredibly annoying, sometimes it baits with information which lures in people who believe it.
Recently, former HGTV host of Fixer Upper, Joanna Gaines, had to address her fans on social media and her own web publication that she was not leaving Fixer Upper so she could launch her own skin care line. She left for other reasons. The "Fake News" story had disturbed the fans enough to where Joanna Gaines felt she had to address her viewership with the truth.
When you come across unbelievable information, first ask yourselves these questions:
Is what they are claiming true?
How do you know it is true? (The best way to determine if something is true is to look at their evidence.)
What do they provide for evidence?
Does the evidence come from respectable or credible sources?
Does the evidence make logical sense?
Can another source back up this evidence?
This is establishing ethos. Ethos evokes a sense of trustworthiness and respect. Consider the Joanna Gaines example. In the photo, the headline of the article claims that the information had been reported in Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Women's Health and People magazines. So Google it. If an article appears on any of these magazines, then it "might" be credible. Note that two sources are good, five sources are better.
Beware of evidence which uses:
Random blogs: these individuals are not always experts in their field
Uncited information: If they cannot back up their statements, then how can you be certain they are not making it up.
Unauthorized material: Think about unauthorized biographies, Wikipedia articles and Reddit. They could be right, but they haven’t been fact checked by the source.
Corporate Sponsored information: Pepsi is never going to be honest about the health effects of sugar. They are biased. Always beware biased information.
If you are attempting to establish ethos in your informative writing, make sure you:
Use declarative statements of facts
Provide evidence to those facts by quoting and referencing reliable sources. By doing this, you establish where your information originates and answers the question, “What do you know?”
The primary genre conventions of Informative Genres are Accuracy and Clarity. The expectation from your viewer/listener/reader is that the information you are providing is correct. If they suspect the information is inaccurate, they will stop engaging with your composition. If the information is not understandable or clear, they will stop engaging with your compositions. You want to create a composition that people want to view/listen/read until the end. Other genre conventions will depend upon the specific mode. Informative genres can come in many modes, and often the choice of one mode over the other will be determined by the type of information you are attempting to convey. There is a reason why most recipes or instruction manuals are not in podcast form. People need the images in order to ensure what they are constructing is correct.
Sometimes storytelling is used in an informative genre. Examples of that would be memoirs, documentaries, investigative journalism in the form of long-read articles or podcasts. Some old forms of ballads were written to inform and warn residents of crime.
Don’t Forget:
To schedule your meeting time for our first conference next week.
This Week's Twitter Assignment: After reading Bitzer's Rhetorical Situation, create a Twitter thread and explain the rhetorical situation as if you were telling your parent or caregiver (whoever you choose to explain it to).
P1 SA1 Research Question Proposals are due FRIDAY 9/6 before 11:59 pm.
