Blog #2 : Teaching Critical Genre Awareness

Amy Devitt

When I was in second grade, I remember clearly, being introduced to the 5-paragraph-essay. I remember my teacher telling us that an essay requires an introduction, 3 body paragraphs and a conclusion. As I moved up grades, English teachers would add more things to it such as a thesis statement, attention grabber, however, the format never changed. It was still a 5 paragraph essay with longer paragraphs. Ever since then, I have been using this method of writing in every class I have taken in school.

In the academic research “Teaching Critical Awareness” (2009), by Amy Devitt, Devitt brings to our attention that this structure of writing has become its own genre. What she means by this is that, the format, structure, that the essay its being written as has become the "ideal" way of writing, in other words the genre of the essay. Whenever a teacher asks their students to write any type of essay, this is the one students go to. Just like Devitt says, the genre of the essays has become “formulaic and constraining” (337). Sometimes there’s even genres within genres. For example, in college you learn to write an essay in MLA format. When you hear the words essay you think of writing that five essay paragraph and when the words MLA get thrown in the you start thinking double space, sources, page number and all of a sudden math comes to mind because everything is so technical in this genre. The space between the header and the title. How far off to the right must your last name and page number be. You get the gist.

Now, Not only is the text we are writing having a genre, but so is the format of our writing.

At work we also have a specific kind of genre we use when writing emails back to customers. Like school, our work writings also have their own genre but they differed in the way that ours are responses to customers while essays are to inform, analyze or compare and contrast things. Ours are emails that are short and go straight to the point and don’t require any amount of words or any form of length. At school your essays need a certain amount of paragraphs typed, a certain length of words and it has to be formal. Our emails at work are intended to make the customer feel appreciated. We write emails thanking customers for shopping with us. We also let customers know about our sales. Those emails are different than a simple “Thank you for shopping with us” emails.

When we send our “sale emails,” those include more pictures than words. The reason we do that is to attract customers to come in and do some shopping. So in other words, we persuade the customer with pictures and numbers. In this email we target everyone, teens, kids, men, women, middle age people and so on.

Devitt says “To teach a particular genre is to teach that genre’s context” (338). What I understand from this is that, our writings depend on the audience that’s reading the article. For example, you wouldn’t write an essay with the same format and choice of words you use when making a blog or updating your Facebook status. This leads me to answering the question of what does Devitt mean when she says “When writers take up a genre, they take up that genre's ideology" (339). The ideology here is used as the identity of the format. Like mentioned earlier, we have been taught the “right” and “wrong” ways of writing an essay or emails or even our résumé. When we type our résumé, we know what we have to include and where they have to be position, just like when writing an essay. We know that an essay need attention grabber, body paragraphs, thesis and conclusions. This are the ideology that I believe she means when we take up on any writing of genre.

Towards the end of the article Devitt mentions that “people are more at the mercy of existing genres and existing power structures and dynamics” (347) when they keep using and teaching the same genre structure. Devitt believes that one must think outside the box. We need to be not taught this genre anymore because we are being held back from pretty much being able to think differently and our communication skills show that. Devitt says that she has been practicing her beliefs and it has helped her students in “shaping [their] influence of genres [and] on their thinking and communicating [skills]” (347).

To be honest with you, before reading this article I also had question our writing genres. Not everyone is comfortable with the same type of genre writing for different occasions. Like professor Flewelling mentioned in the blog “it feels different to write a waltz than it does a head-banging rock song, and if I write waltzes all the time, I'll be a different person than if I write rock songs all the time.” Not everyone is meant to write in the type of genres that get inculcated often in schools because it doesn’t work for everyone. We are all different people and we all think differently. If we had other way of writing genres that were taught to us we would have more options like in the music example. I feel that because of this, my WPA was affected. I tried to go a different direction with my genre and since the readers of my essay might not be open to any changes in genre then they saw it as a “wrong” way of format.

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