CI5461: So many genres

Like many of the students Romano describes in his book, I was initially resistant to writing in genres such as poetry, short story and 10-minute plays. I felt that way mostly because I'd never actually tried writing them, though I'd read many of them all. So I think I can identify with these resistant writers and the students in my classes who may not feel like writing dialogue is a skill they possess. I can honestly say to them that they might just be surprised by their own abilities.

Immediately, then, it was easy to resist the idea of the multigenre paper. Why do it? I wondered. We choose a genre for a specific purpose, a specific audience. Why blend them? Yet within a seemingly illogical framework is the logic that if you wanted to reach a given audience on varied levels you could tailor your style between a number of collected pieces. Romano illustrates this well with his William Basie example. The concept makes sense, and I like the challenge it presents writers.

Make no mistake, though: This is surely a challenge. It demands at least a competence with the strengths of certain genres, like a menu's ability to affect the sense of taste or a user manual's robotic directness. Were I to teach this, then, I would most definitely brainstorm genres, especially the non-traditional ones like DVD case synopses and course syllabi. I would urge students to pick up anything around them that has text, bring it to class and talk about what it communicates. In this way, I would urge them to see text all around them and how twitter succeeds as a medium.

The more I think of it, the more I think a multigenre paper leads to an appreciation of all our literary outlets in a world that seems to be - but actually, I'd argue, is not - less and less literate. Preliminarily, that is how I see myself blending in a multigenre paper, as a way to experiment with different writing styles and making it an exploration of how much we actually write.

A brief list of unconventional genres that have come to me in the past few minutes:

Wedding Invitations

Recipes

Obituaries

Coupons

Christmas cards

Warning Labels

Washing Instructions

Letters of Recommendation

Textbooks from 1878 (with illustrations)

Baseball Cards

Board Game Instructions

External Resource: A gallery of MG projects at Colorado State

I stumbled into this site during a search. On the Table of Contents page there are links to a number of examples of MG papers. I looked at a few, and they look pretty good. If anything, they present a diversity of topics. I liked Batman Backpack.