Kress
With Kress’ opening question, as I read the first page of this article, I came with the understanding and belief that genre is a category that applies to all forms of representation and communication. Before reading this article, genre has always been an ‘umbrella’ term. My goal by the end of this article is to be able to decide if genre should be a term used for areas other than linguistic subjects.
I agree that distortions can be caused when terms that are mode-specific be transported into different fields. You lose the origin of the theory when it is used in different fields that can be vastly different. By using the term, ‘genre’ in other fields, are we assuming that these other subjects have linguistic undertones or origins? For example, with photography, don’t we take photos to tell a story that the written word cannot in the same light?
If Genre is a category which realizes the social relations of the participants involved in the text as interaction, than surely we can use the term genre to cover an array of modes because each mode that uses genre has in some way, social relations.
Bernhardt
I work part-time at a law firm, so when Bernhardt states “Legal writing also displays a “tendency to make more and more use of layout and other graphitic and grapholigical devices as a means of revealing structure, content, and logical progression.” I definitely agree with this, as most of my job is consumed of typing out briefs and other legal documents. My boss is a stickler to keeping a format in which there is a lot of paragraph breaks. Every few sentences I make a new paragraph, and after having this job for over three years, this rule has crept into my classroom writing.
For me, I now like writing with a paragraph break every 3-4 sentences. I think it is clear, and encouraging to read, rather than getting muddled in a huge paragraph with little awareness of what you are reading or the significance of it. When a lawyer spends a week on one, 40-page brief for example, they really want the judge and counsel to read every word of the brief. By breaking it up into small paragraphs, it is a way in which to not make it too overwhelming or visually too intense so that everyone reads every single word.
Wysocki
Wysocki states that “visual arrangements do some of the work of the genre.” I agree with this, because usually the visual element of the work is what can set it apart from another work. For example, it probably takes less than 5 seconds for our brains to distinguish a comic strip from a research paper, an advertisement to a news story, etc. So much study and analyzing goes in to the many facets of lay out; font size, font type, organization of page, etc.
I would argue we are becoming a more appearance-obsessed society and that goes a lot farther than people and places. Teams of people are in charge of designing apps, blogs, online stores, social media layouts, etc. and the appearance of those things is of high importance to us. How this came to be I am not sure, but a well-thought out, visually stimulating presence is what can make or break your online persona, and thus, your persona as a whole (as sad and scary as that is).
Cassidy,
ReplyDeleteReading your post made me think of the article about literacy and its being transplanted into different fields. It is something that seems so ordinary that it gets overlooked. The same thing can be said about genre and the implications it carries. Your example of photography got me thinking about the etymology of the word photography. I’m pretty sure it means writing with light. So if we consider that against genre, maybe genre is something that can be spread across anything that involves inscription regardless of the medium on which the inscription occurs.
-Aaron
"By breaking it up into small paragraphs, it is a way in which to not make it too overwhelming or visually too intense so that everyone reads every single word." I'm guilty as charged! I haven't put much thought to it before, but upon further reflection, I realize that I really do read every word of an article if it's broken up into short paragraphs rather than huge chunks of text. I wonder why people are wired this way: should we blame technology for shortening our attention spans? Or maybe when we see a sparse paragraph, we assume every sentence to be really important and essential to the main idea; in contrast, perhaps we assume that the longer the paragraph, the more "fluff" we can skim over in order to understand the basic topic presented.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly enough, even though I think that short paragraphs make for easier readability, I certainly don't write in that style (as you may well have figured out by now, ha). On a semi-related thought, do you remember McCloud's discussion of language and image and his illustration of the pyramid? Do you think that maybe our modern, more concise style of writing is leading text back toward the iconic aspect of written communication?