Sarah Swofford
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
The purpose of this assignment is to help students develop a process for learning unfamiliar genres successfully. This assignment is the first part of a two-assignment sequence (the second part is “A Proposal for Change on Campus,” also found in Writing Spaces’ Assignment and Activities Archive) in a first-year writing course. Being able to approach unfamiliar genres and have a process for composing them is often hailed as one of the ways that first-year writing teaches students transferable writing skills (Devitt; Driscoll et al.; Tardy et al.). Many expert writers have developed a process to do just that, and it often looks something like what has been described as “genre analysis” (Swales). This process allows the writer to identify and define the genre they’re examining, analyze the key communicative elements of that text and the essential functions those elements serve towards the genre’s purpose, find patterns and conventions that a practiced reader would expect to find, and consider how this genre works to accomplish for its intended audience. Over the years, though, I’ve struggled to effectively teach this process to my students (even though I use it all the time as a writer). Helping them conceptualize genre not just as “text type,” but as a means of understanding how writers navigate their social roles and expectations (Miller) has proven tricky. The readings listed in the directions below have helped immensely in offering accessible explanations for the complex concepts of discourse communities, genre, and move analysis that undergird this particular assignment. I’ve taught genre analysis to first-year students in this way at my access-oriented university, but this assignment is very flexible, and I’ve successfully also used it with upper-division students in a Professional Writing course, Writing for Nonprofits. In the first-year course, the students in the class all analyze the same genre (a project proposal), and they then use their genre analyses to craft a proposal for change they’d like to see happen on our campus. At the upper-division, students analyze a genre requested by their nonprofit clients—each student analyzing a different genre than their classmates. They then compose the text requested by their clients, using the genre analysis to guide them. I typically end both courses by asking students to write a rationale, explaining how their second project is effective, how their first project guided their writerly choices in the second project, and what they’d do differently if they were to start over now.