Writing Project 1:
Shifting Genres, Shifting Audiences

Teaching Assistant: Patrick Mooney
Writing 2
Winter 2015

Writing strategies we are working on here: The purpose of this writing project is to become aware of genre and the expectations for writing associated with an established framework. You already know a great deal about these expectations and practices, although it may be that you have not spent much time thinking about them explicitly. Whenever we write, inside or outside of academia, we are writing for a specific audience, which has specific expectations about the writing, and we shape our writing to comply with or transgress these expectations. Your goal for this assignment is to identify, discuss, and analyze the context for two pieces of your written work that you have completed within the last six months. We will each accomplish this task by thinking about who we write for, our audience, and why. This will help us determine the boundaries inherent in genre — and the kinds of opportunities for expression, persuasion, and creativity that can happen within these boundaries. For example, the language and diction that you would use to write a letter to the chancellor of UCSB to complain about an injustice occurring on campus would be much different from the language and diction you would use to send a text message to your roommate about how your day went — and this would be different still from an email that you send to a parent or guardian asking for money for books for the quarter. The result of this activity will be for each of us to successfully analyze two pieces of our writing, and to understand the conventions of each genre and how being aware of our audience can help improve our writing.

Readings for WP 1:

• Kerry Dirk, Navigating Genres
• Mike Bunn, How to Read Like a Writer
• Anne Lamott, Shitty First Drafts

Assignment Description: Please select two pieces of writing that you have produced within the last six months. The first piece of writing should be an assignment that you formally turned in to be evaluated in some way, preferably one that you did not enjoy writing. This could be a term paper, college entrance essay, scholarship essay, or even a job application, provided that the piece of writing was meant to be evaluated by someone. Try to find something between two and three typed pages. The second should be a piece of writing that you completed but that was not formally evaluated – a blog entry, a long status update or other post on a social network, a movie or music or product review, or a longer email to a friend. This piece of writing can be much shorter, but should at least be two paragraphs long. If possible, try to locate an unevaluated piece of writing that you enjoyed composing.

Your assignment for this WP is to write an academic essay analyzing the purpose, audience, and context for each piece of writing. More specifically, you should:

• explain why you wrote each piece (because you had to? to explain an idea to one or more friends? to build status on a social network? to argue for a particular idea?);
• identify your target audience and how you interacted with them (did you use slang or special terms to appeal to that audience? in what other ways did you leverage your knowledge of community expectations in order to make your writing effective?);
• identify the conditions in which you wrote each piece (were you in a bad/good mood? Were you trying to meet a deadline? were there high stakes involved, in some way, in your writing? was it something you did purely for pleasure?).

As you address each of the above components when evaluating your two pieces of writing, think about (and discuss) the following question: When I write, how do I consider a specific audience, and how does that audience influence my writing style, creative process, and enjoyment of writing? Finally, I would like each of you to end your essay by answering a reflective question in the conclusion: If given the opportunity to rewrite either piece: would I, and why?

WP Format: Please write five to six pages (typed, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 point font with 1 inch margins all around). Use MLA citations where necessary.

Assignment Notes: You must be able to access both pieces of writing, either the original digital file, or the original hard copy. In other words, you cannot complete this assignment based only on your memory of the pieces involved. However, you will not be turning in the originals with your WP 1 submission. The goal, after all, is to explain the context of your previous writing, not simply to hand in work you've done before.

Project Builder A (Due January 7): For this project builder, I want you to think about a genre of writing that you know well and encounter, voluntarily, for enjoyment and pleasure. Before you begin, please read Dirk's Navigating Genres. Thinking about what genre means, choose a genre or subgenre with which you are familiar — a type of creative production that you follow because you are personally interested in it. This genre could be, for instance, zombie films, indie-rock love songs, Petrarchan sonnets, whodunit detective stories, romance novels, tracts on existential philosophy, police-procedural television dramas, sermons, hymns, political cartoons, science-fiction movies ... it could be almost any genre that has a substantial verbal component (though I want you to avoid nonverbal genres, such as paintings or instrumental music, for this assignment, and I want you to avoid choosing Dirk's own example of country music songs). In a short piece of one and a half to two pages, describe the basic conventions of the genre you have chosen, paying attention to what its audience expects.

Project Builder B (Due January 12): Spend a bit of time reflecting, on paper, on the writing samples you have chosen. First, read Bunn, How to Read like a Writer. Take a moment and consider both your pieces of writing and the choices you made when composing them. What genre were you writing in? Did the format (Facebook post, blog, email, letter, etc) influence how you wrote? Did you expect your target audience to respond to your writing? In what way? Did you use any hooks or special techniques to get your reader’s attention? What worked well? What did not work well? Consider at least some of these questions, selecting questions that you will answer for each piece, and write about one page for each piece of writing that you have selected.

Project Builder Format: Each of your PBs should be about two pages (typed, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 point font, with 1 inch margins all around) and written in the form of a free write. When answering the PB prompt questions, I want you to write down the first reactions that come to mind. Do not worry too much about formalities: grammar, sentence structure, etc. Please record your stream of consciousness, revise/edit for clarity and specificity at least once, and turn it in.

How PBs factor in: The project builders are designed to help create the foundation for the WP itself. Therefore, you may use elements from one or both PBs as a foundation for your WP essay. In other words, the first PB asks you to consider what constituates a genre and how that genre constructs expectations in its fans and followers. Feel free to expand upon that analysis for the WP essay. Likewise, the second PB focuses on your own writing, asking you to apply these insights about genre to your own work. Take these lines of analysis and fashion them into a larger-scale piece of writing. In other words, you are free to use your two PBs and revise them for the larger WP, though you should not simply staple them together (either literally or metaphorically): your goal is to create a single longer, unified, sustained piece of writing.

Questions to ponder for your WP 1 Cover Letter: Did you have more freedom writing for one audience more than the other when looking back at your writing? Which piece best reflects your style and creativity? After completing this WP, do you think we are restricted by genre? Or does the ability to identify your audience free you to be creative? What have you learned from WP 1?

Evaluation of this Writing Project: I will evaluate this writing project based upon your ability to thoughtfully and thoroughly answer, in the form of an analytical essay, the questions I have provided in the assignment description. This means that your essay must begin by stating specifically whether your writing changed in terms of style, creativity, and freedom between the audiences of your evaluated piece and your unevaluated piece. You must explain why your writing style and creative process did or did not change by analyzing the purpose, audience, and context in which you wrote each piece. Your concluding paragraph should reflect on whether or not you would rewrite either piece. I am looking for a clean, well-revised essay and a thoughtful cover letter with your submission.

If these elements are sufficiently met, you will receive a B for this assignment. If these elements are met and exceeded, you will receive an A. If some but not all of these elements are met, you will receive a C. If you turn in something that does not even meet minimum standards for engaging with the assignment, you will receive no credit. If you do not turn in an assignment in a timely fashion, you will not be able to pass the course at the end of the term.