- Sep 2016
-
via3.hypothes.is via3.hypothes.isschryer.pdf10
-
At the end of the article, Schryer suggests that students should not acquiesce to genres. We need to able to see what parts of certain genres work for our intended audience, why they work, and how to improve them if they don't. Technical communication has to rely on presenting information in different ways through different mediums and different genres. To fully comprehend the best way to do that, we need to learn and write and immerse ourselves in writing in different genres.
-
On the bottom of page 228, it is suggested that because we spend so much time in school practicing only a few genres, the lack of knowledge about other genres actually ends up hurting our overall writing. I think this is so true; years and years of writing essay after essay makes me knowledge about writing essays and what goes in it and what my essay writing process is, but what about everything else?
The fact that lots of GSU classes are starting to lean away from "traditional" writing assignments to broaden our knowledge of how to write makes us more marketable in our future, but also more literate. Understanding how to write in different genres adds a whole level of literacy to our lives that most people before us never got. It is not enough anymore to know how to write essays; being literate in all forms and genres of writing makes you more valuable. to the advancing world around us.
-
At the bottom of 226, "The person creating the record was not as important as the organizational existence of the record itself."
Audience is the key factor in any rhetorical writing. Considering the audience is what sets technical communication apart from other forms of communication. The audience should dictate what and how and why you write, and the audience should be thought of in every decision you might make when producing something of any genre. That is how genres change and evolve...with their audiences.
-
I think one of the reasons that record keeping should be organized and that Dr. Weed had the right idea is because of audience. While many people would consider records as something on person sees, the secondary audience is technically every in the office that has access to it. If a person moved from Georgia to California and their medical records weren't accessible to their new doctor, then a slew of problems rise. It's important to think of not only the primary audience when creating anything but also the potential secondary audience.
-
In the middle of page 214, "Weed wanted to make medical records more readable more scientific--in effect, more open to monitoring, evaluation, and standardization than traditional records."
Weed basically wanted to change the genre. By making it more accessible and organized, he proposed a change of the set rules of the genre by introducing a new technology. Oftentimes, a new technology can prompt a change in the way that we can and should do things.
-
Bottom of 208 into 209 is a perfect way to think about genre. It can be conventionalized, but the freedom of expression is also there. Genres can be ever changing and ever growing, just like technical writing as we saw in the Albers article.
-
On the top of 208, "if a genre is used to describe stable systems, then the concept is rhetorically unsound because a stable system cannot respond to changes in audience or circumstance."
Genres CAN'T have a set of rules that shouldn't be broken because not all audiences are the same. A product might need to be on the internet, but it might be an audience of senior citizens who have poor eyesight. How can we combine those two needs if we have to stick in a bound box of rules?
-
When I think of genre, I like to think of it in terms of music. There are many different genres of music, and we can categorize music into these genres based on characteristics of the song and what we hear. For instance, if a banjo is present in a song, people oftentimes will categorize it as "country". If there is a song that has no lyrics, people hastily call it "classical". But not every song with a banjo in it is a country song and not every classical piece is without lyrics.
While genres can be very prescriptive in terms of the content and medium, it isn't always the case. Genres aren't formulas and they can be innovated and changed just like musical genres.
-
On page 204, we get the main argument to this text: whether or not record keeping is vital to some disciplines and also how genre can be used to explain the ideology behind it.
-
The conversation at the beginning of the article really sets a question in the readers' mind: what matters more, the actual content that you write or how really you write it? If there are some disciplines that don't evaluate how well you write something because of the genre in which the disciplines exists, then why study writing and English?
(Because people actually do care about how well you write.)
-