Sankovich 1 Kyle Sankovich Professor Christian Berry ENC 1102 10 February 2013 Reading Response 3: Changing the Way

We Look at Genre Linguists today, feel that the understanding of genre has taken a turn for the worst. Amy Devitt is one of them and feels that over time we have skewed the meaning of genre in order to help us understand it easier. Genre is a complex topic and in order to help their students understand it better, teachers taught them the basic definition of genre but from there, they unknowingly taught them a generic form for all genres. Devitts goal is move away from this understanding and towards one that involves rhetorical situations and roots of genre. Devitt illustrates many times that she is displeased with the division of understanding regarding genre. I agree that through school, I was taught to take a genre I was given, fill it with my own content, and then turn it in to be graded. Over the course of high school, I received high grades and I accredited this to the fact that I followed the genre the teacher gave me. Over time I began to associate excellent grades with the strategy my teacher had trained in me. I was never told to create my own genre from scratch; I was always given a template and then graded on how well I could follow it. The worst part about this was the fact that we had to follow the same genre for every assignment not matter what type it was. We wrote in the same format for all of our assignments, which is why it is difficult to understand genre now even. Devitt claims Genre determines the components of the literary work (4). In high school we did the exact opposite of this and had the content of our assignments dictate our genre. This is exactly what Devitt was trying to correct.

Sankovich 2 The meaning of genre that should be taught in schools, according to Devitt, is that genre determines the situation and situation determines the genre (7). She takes this idea from Lloyd Bitzers work and thoroughly agrees with it as do I. Genre must change based on the situation, otherwise the reader is left confused about what is going on. For example, if you used a lab report format when your goal is to compose a poem does not make much sense. Of course this is an exaggeration but it is similar to what we were taught in high school. We must pick an appropriate genre based on what we are writing so that the meaning of our writing comes from the genre. Devitt seems fond of M. M. Bakhtin as she frequently quotes him throughout her article. Bakhtin states, the single utterance, with all its individuality and creativity, can in no way regarded as a completely free combination of forms of language (Bakhtin 81). I agree with Bakhtin here because it is true when you think about. There will always be some sort of connection or thought that comes up when something is mentioned. This is the way our brain works and it is important to know that these are connections are genre essentially. By making a connection, it makes it easier for our brain to comprehend what is being said. This is just what is done naturally. As a student, this is information is beneficial to know but not the most necessary. I believe it is more beneficial for teachers and instructors because they are the ones teaching the students who will carry on the conversation. If we are taught the actual meaning of genre and how it is unique based on the situation, it will the dichotomy explained by Devitt. It would be more difficult for students to understand than what is being taught now, however, once they understood the concept they would be much more proficient in writing. By not teaching the students at a young age, they waste time learning the wrong way and it makes it difficult to

Sankovich 3 relearn it later. This is just my opinion after growing up and going through the current education system we have in place. I just believe that todays public primary and secondary education is flawed and needs to be overhauled because times have changed drastically while the schools have only changed slightly.

Sankovich 4 Works Cited Bakhtin, M. M. Discourse in the Novel. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: U of Texas P, 1981. 81. Bitzer, Lloyd F. The Rhetorical Situation. Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (Winter 1968): Devitt, Amy. , Generalizing about Genre. College Composition and Communication 44.4 (1993): 573-86. JSTOR.