Welcome to My Blog

I am going to start teaching a “writing class” at CEC this Winter Session. I put writing class in quotation marks because I plan on spending almost as much time on speaking, listening, and reading as I do on writing. I hope that my students and I will be able to see some similarities between these different skills by asking what genre (or genres) — i.e., what kind (or kinds) of — speaking, listening, reading, and writing that we examine represent.

I haven’t ever used the term genre this way before. This is the entry for genre from the American Heritage® Dictionary, Fourth Edition, Copyright © 2002:

gen·re (JOHN ruh) n.
1. A type or class: “Emaciated famine victims ... on television focused a new genre of attention on the continent” (Helen Kitchen).
2.
a. A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, marked by a distinctive style, form, or content: “his six String Quartets ... the most important works in the genre since Beethoven’s” (Time).
b. A realistic style of painting that depicts scenes from everyday life.

[French, from Old French, kind, from Latin genus, gener- …]

Our use of the word will be similar to that in 2a. However, while 2a refers to common genres in, say, movies (e.g., comedy, drama, action, romance, and science fiction), we will discover (or make up our own) genres for speaking: e.g., directions, small talk, a job interview, and a speech. We will also look at similarities and differences between these genres in speaking and genres in writing: e.g., a recipe, email for friends, a business letter, and an expository paragraph (a paragraph that explains a thing, idea, or process).

And speaking of writing, I hope that every student will post some writing on this blog. I also hope that each student will create and post writing on their own blog! In that way, we will have concrete, realistic examples of “the communicative purpose of the … genre, the roles of the writer and the audience, and the context in which the genre is used” (endnote 1) for at least some of our writing.

Endnote 1
Osman, H. (2004) “Genre-based Instruction for ESP,” The English Teacher 33: 13—29.