The Unfamiliar Genre Project

The sequence of assignments: the genre analysis, reading log, and writing a genre sample, was really helpful for me to truly understand the genre and how best to approach teaching it to my students. The genre analysis and reading log required a very close reading of texts in the genre and an analysis of language that helped me see what I should focus on teaching my students so that they could complete a writing task to reproduce this genre. This assignment in particular helped me reflect on my own writing practices which I can in turn model for and teach to my students. I can provide specific scaffolded instructions to walk them through the same steps I did, since they have less experience as writers. Below is an explanation of my writing process highlighting the steps that I think are valuable to teach to my students.

1. The genre analysis and reading log

a. I think these steps are a crucial starting point for a genre reproduction writing task sequence. Students need to not just be exposed to genre samples but taught how to read them closely and analyze the language used. My students will need me to lead these steps, to model the process for them, and to scaffold any parts that I ask them to do independently, as this will be completely new for them.

2. Planning for writing

a. I created an outline as I planned to write my genre sample. I decided I would organize my blog post into three sections for activities to do in the morning, afternoon, and night, a chronological itinerary for one day in Denver. However, even though all blog posts have different sections labeled by headings, each blog post is organized in different ways. For example, two of the blog posts I read were organized by different locations or cities to visit within a country, while the other was organized as a day-by-day itinerary. I would create a brainstorming worksheet to help my students decide first what destination(s) they would like to write about and then also the best way to organize their information. After brainstorming, I would ask them to create an outline like I did before they actually start writing. Just as I did, I will ask students to write bullet points under each heading for major points they will make, find an image for each section (of the most interesting landmark they discuss in that section), and make note of any external resources they will be linking in each section, as well.

3. First draft

a. After brainstorming and planning with an outline, it is time to write the first draft. I usually write my texts in order, starting at the beginning with an introduction and working my way to the concluding paragraph, regularly referring to my outline so I don’t leave out any important points. Since I had my outline complete, the introduction was easy to write. I considered how I might “hook” the audience and also give them a clear idea of what they would read about in the rest of the blog post. My students may need to be reminded to also do consider these things in their own introductions. I focused on linguistic accuracy as I was writing and used wordreference.com (an online dictionary) to find synonyms in order to have more variety and therefore make my text more interesting to read. However, for my students who are novice, I might encourage them to write a rough draft completely on their own at first and then when they go back to reread it and revise, they could consider linguistic accuracy and variation. I usually encourage them to “use the language that they know” and to “keep it simple”, but from my own genre-based writing experience, I can now see the value in adding a revision step in which students go back and look for repetitive verb or lexical usage and replace these with appropriate synonyms. My students will need a lesson on how to use an online dictionary effectively and appropriately for this step to work. Most times, they just write the first result in the list without considering if it is appropriate for the context. Because I have a higher proficiency and more knowledge about language, I was able to easily find more varied and interesting words to use, but I will need to teach my students how to read the online dictionary results, including how to find the part of speech and determine if it is an appropriate choice for the context by reading the example sentences etc.