Engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond.

This is a Course Learning Outcome which I do not fully understand, but believe there is a potential gain in writing ability to be had by exploring this Course Learning Outcome. That is enough reason to warrant exploring this Course Learning Outcome.

All throughout this semester, I and my classmates have engaged in routine “genre analysis” assignments, which involved investigating and criticising samples of different genres (memo, technical description….). This was very helpful in preparing myself to undertake a project in a genre that I am unexperienced in. It exposed me to the genre before beginning my writing project. Genre analysis also invited me to pick out the things that were wrong in the samples, forewarning me to the same mistakes.

In my opinion, the system is not perfect. I personally would prefer to know how the samples rank before undertaking the genre analysis, this way I would know for a fact what traits are desirable and which aren’t. Another advantage to knowing the ranking of the samples would be preventing students from unknowingly looking at a poor sample for inspiration.

This is especially true for a student who is unfamiliar with the genre in question, as he or she will find it more distinguish between the good samples and bad samples.

I understand why one would choose for the rank of the samples to be not told to the students. This would force the students to really pay attention, and pick apart the samples. It would also force students to learn to use their own intuition, teaching young professionals to “trust their gut”, so to speak. That being said, my preference is still to know the rank of the samples before undertaking my genre analysis.