In other words, genres evolve and change over time, and each user taking up a genre takes it up just a little bit differently.

With all this genre knowledge you’re developing, are you just a little worried that you’re basically going to be a borg, scrolling through your limited options in a nano-second, the choices all but made for you?

It’s like doing field work: you bring your wits and your gear and you figure it out by observing and jumping in. This is where a writing class can be very helpful, helping you to attune yourself to a writing situation, to cues that will guide you in assessing expectations, conventions, and possible responses.

Bawarshi thinks that this genre is like a habitat—a place that sustains the creatures that live in it and really sets the living conditions for those creatures.

“If you find out a civil engineer needs to write proposals, work orders, progress reports, quality test reports, safety evaluations, and a limited number of other similar documents, you have gone a long way toward identifying the work they do.”

. But do graphs and headings alone make a piece of writing a report?

It can seem that what you’re supposed to learn is how to approximate the genre, and you hope that by observing and then imitating the genre features, you’ll produce writing that behaves like the genre

But even in your writing courses, you should start to become more aware of the genres that are built into the settings in which you currently find yourself—school, work, public life—as well as genres that are at work in other settings you want to be a part of.

Each time a writer takes up a genre, the writer reaffirms, in a way, the stable features of the genre.

The Supreme Court justice writing for the majority knows that she will not write a haiku.

the genre is simply part of your accustomed toolset, and you know very well which tool to use

You, as a writer in that situation, don’t precisely choose that genre, nor its formal characteristics—in a way, the situation chooses those for you, and all the people who are doing similar work to you use the same genre, in much the same way, and probably have been doing so for quite some time.

repeated instances of action and are reinforced by institutional power structures.

We might expect, in a recurrent situation, to observe, then, recurring types of communication.

typified characteristic, typical utterance any act of language — written or spoken recurrent happens again and again

The names of the things you write—e-mails, messages, record or application forms, order forms, lab reports, field observations, applications, narratives, text messages, and so on—can be thought of as individual compositions, large or small, that happen incidentally in the course of other activity.

there’s power in rewriting.

Similarly, the way someone imagines his future seems to affect the way he sees his past, at the same time as his past informs what he expects for the future.

The uncertainty of the future makes people uncomfortable, and stories are a way to deal with that.

If you’re prone to overthinking, and playing out every possible scenario in your head in advance, you can see foreshadowing in everything

“What really matters is whether people are making something meaningful and coherent out of what happened. Any creation of a narrative is a bit of a lie. And some lies have enough truth.”

It’s a dizzying problem: People use stories to make sense of life, but how much do those stories reflect life’s realities?

But I wondered: Though agency may be good for you, does seeing yourself as a strong protagonist come at a cost to the other characters in your story? Are there implications for empathy if we see other people as bit players instead of protagonists in their own right?

it’s less clear if feeling communion now predicts well-being later.

“I’m the only person that I can rely on in my life because I’ve tried to rely on other people and I either get stabbed in the back or hurt, so I really know that I can only trust myself and rely on myself,”

t can be hard to share a story when it amounts to: “This happened, and it was terrible. The end.”

finding a positive meaning in negative events is linked to a more complex sense of self and greater life satisfaction.

Having redemption themes in one’s life story is generally associated with greater well-being, while contamination themes tend to coincide with poorer mental health.

One such blueprint is your standard “go to school, graduate, get a job, get married, have kids.”

The path from outside to inside and back out is winding, dark, and full of switchbacks.

One is that people tailor the stories they tell to their audiences and the context.

Pretty much from birth, people are “actors.”

In one study by McLean, older adults had more thematic coherence, and told more stories about stability, while young adults tended to tell more stories about change.

I have a child who can really take an hour to tell you about Minecraft.”

“The way we do that is by structuring our lives into stories.”

Storytelling, then—fictional or nonfictional, realistic or embellished with dragons—is a way of making sense of the world around us.

Journal-keeping, though a way of documenting the life story, doesn’t always make for a tightly-wound narrative.

there’s huge variation in the degree to which they engage in narrative storytelling in the first place.

they kind of have to do it in a narrative way—that’s just how humans communicate

a person’s life story is not a Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life, but rather the way a person integrates those facts and events internally—picks them apart and weaves them back together to make meaning.

important parts of personality,

They are personality, or more accurately, they are important parts of personality, along with other parts, like dispositional traits, goals, and values,”

‘It’s just not how I expected my life would be,'" he says.

Recurring writing assignments

As members of this WRT 109 studio, we can all offer that grace to one another in our interactions—in how we listen and how we respond.

Syracuse University’s Academic Integrity Polic

Expectations for participation

isten and talk, ask questions and answer them, and expect to learn from everyone else in the class—that’s the premise of a studio course like this one

Course assignments will be submitted through Blackboardor Expressions(blog)

During the course, you will annotate readings, keep a record of ideas and responses, take notes on class discussions, maintain a writer’s journal, contribute to our class blog, experiment with different genres, and engage in a variety of invention, drafting, and revision techniques.

his course focuses on the aims, strategies, and conventions of academic prose, especially analysis and argumentation.

ervice learning section of WRT 109.

Also for that reason we will read and write in a range of genres

these are skills that transfer to many different writing situations

In short, it is a course that will help you to develop your skills of critical thinking and explanation.