Genre Speed Dating
Purpose of Exercise: To get a series of investigative questions that help students interrogate their specific, chosen genre.
Description: A partner activity to help students solidify ideas of analysis and genre and to create a personal toolbox of questions that can be transferred to other writing situations. This also is an inventive activity meant to generate ideas for genre analysis.
Suggested Time: 20 minutes
Procedure: Students will bring their chosen genres for paper 1 and exchange with a partner. Each member of the pair will come up with 5 questions that will help the partner analyze their chosen genre. Papers/genres will be exchanged and students will discuss their sets of questions. As students switch to new partners, they will encounter new questions which they must answer. They may want to travel with pen/paper to take notes on their answers. Questions about questions or genre interrogation will be brought before the class.
You might create standard questions that guide students based on your project's goals.
Some might be:
1, What is the text? Who created it? Why/When was it made? What is it composed of? Who is the intended audience? How is it meant to function rhetorically? 2. What technologies (tools) went into creating it? 3. How do the details of the text show careful thought on the author’s part? (Font, colors, images, placement/design, sounds, materials, choice of moving images, etc.). How are different images/texts/sounds placed in a way that forms associations in the audience’s mind? How do those choices link to how the piece might impact the audience? How do these details signify meaning to the audience? 4. What genre is the text a part of? What are that genre’s conventions? Does it fulfill that genre’s conventions? Does it challenge any of the conventions? If so, why? 5. What are the affordances and constraints associated with the text, its author(s), and its environment? 6. How was it distributed? How was it received by the intended audience? Did it have the rhetorical impact it was intended to have? Is distribution regulated by anything (laws, cultural norms, etc)? 7. How is the text consumed by the audience? How does that method of delivery prove to be effective/ineffective? 8. Did it circulate beyond that intended audience? Was it adapted, transformed, reconfigured to be used in a new setting by a new author? Is circulation regulated by anything (laws, cultural norms, etc)?
Extending: After the activity, you may want to have students freewrite about their answers or work on organizing their thoughts in another way so genre analyses do not become listed answers to questions.