journal 2 sarah wilkerson

Based on my reading of all seven concepts, my definition of genre has shifted. Instead of my initial thought that genre only related to certain styles or themes of books such as mystery or romance, this article points out that genre also largely relates to the audience or what situation a text is being used for. Genre is related to the word choice, situation a text is placed in, and the communication that text wants to relay to the reader. A major idea I can take away from this journal as a writer is how important word choice is in writing to produce a strong mental picture of what I am attempting to portray in my writing. Since there are not as many material clues in writing as when we speak to people, the necessity to understand the entire rhetorical situation is even greater. Genre is important for any writer to understand to best provide the reader of their work the rhetorical clues to clearly understand and make sense of any piece of their writing. Another main idea to take away from the journal is that before writing anything, I need to be aware of the genre I am trying to portray and the audience I am writing too, because the rest of my writing would need to be centralized around that genre. Knowing this beforehand and having a set goal in mind of the entire rhetorical situation would stop any confusion or altered interpretation of my work. The final take-away from the reading is that all writing is multimodal and every communication a human has uses more than one mode, so our writing also must use more than one mode to truly communicate. My understanding of genre has changed, I never considered it differently than categorical genres like I stated in the beginning of my journal. That being said I do not disagree with any of the concepts throughout the article because I did not have much insight into genre or these concepts before, so I have nothing to disagree with or question. Two books that are connected and in the same genre are “And Then There Were None” by Agatha Christie and “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn. These are both mystery books which fall into the same mystery genre, but they both used strong word choice and similar mysterious situations to give readers a problem and mystery to figure out. Both books cater to similar audiences and strive to invoke the similar feelings in their readers, which is why they are in the same genre. The question I have about genre is how all of the seven concepts in the article fit together. All of the completely different topics on genre throughout confused me.