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Kyle Sankovich

Professor Christian Berry

ENC 1102

10 February 2013

Reading Response 3: Changing the Way We Look at Genre

Linguists today, feel that the understanding of genre has taken a turn for the worst. Amy

Devitt is one of them and feels that over time we have skewed the meaning of genre in order to

help us understand it easier. Genre is a complex topic and in order to help their students

understand it better, teachers taught them the basic definition of genre but from there, they

unknowingly taught them a generic form for all genres. Devitts goal is move away from this

understanding and towards one that involves rhetorical situations and roots of genre.

Devitt illustrates many times that she is displeased with the division of understanding

regarding genre. I agree that through school, I was taught to take a genre I was given, fill it with

my own content, and then turn it in to be graded. Over the course of high school, I received high

grades and I accredited this to the fact that I followed the genre the teacher gave me. Over time I

began to associate excellent grades with the strategy my teacher had trained in me. I was never

told to create my own genre from scratch; I was always given a template and then graded on how

well I could follow it. The worst part about this was the fact that we had to follow the same genre

for every assignment not matter what type it was. We wrote in the same format for all of our

assignments, which is why it is difficult to understand genre now even. Devitt claims Genre

determines the components of the literary work (4). In high school we did the exact opposite of

this and had the content of our assignments dictate our genre. This is exactly what Devitt was

trying to correct.

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The meaning of genre that should be taught in schools, according to Devitt, is that genre

determines the situation and situation determines the genre (7). She takes this idea from Lloyd

Bitzers workand thoroughly agrees with it as do I. Genre must change based on the situation,

otherwise the reader is left confused about what is going on. For example, if you used a lab

report format when your goal is to compose a poem does not make much sense. Of course this is

an exaggeration but it is similar to what we were taught in high school. We must pick an

appropriate genre based on what we are writing so that the meaning of our writing comes from

the genre.

Devitt seems fond of M. M. Bakhtin as she frequently quotes him throughout her article.

Bakhtin states, the single utterance, with all its individuality and creativity, can in no way

regarded as a completely free combinationof forms of language (Bakhtin 81). I agree with

Bakhtin here because it is true when you think about. There will always be some sort of

connection or thought that comes up when something is mentioned. This is the way our brain

works and it is important to know that these are connections are genre essentially. By making a

connection, it makes it easier for our brain to comprehend what is being said. This is just what is

done naturally.

As a student, this is information is beneficial to know but not the most necessary. I

believe it is more beneficial for teachers and instructors because they are the ones teaching the

students who will carry on the conversation. If we are taught the actual meaning of genre and

how it is unique based on the situation, it will the dichotomy explained by Devitt. It would be

more difficult for students to understand than what is being taught now, however, once they

understood the concept they would be much more proficient in writing. By not teaching the

students at a young age, they waste time learning the wrong way and it makes it difficult to

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relearn it later. This is just my opinion after growing up and going through the current education

system we have in place. I just believe that todays public primary and secondary education is

flawed and needs to be overhauled because times have changed drastically while the schools

have only changed slightly.

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Works Cited

Bakhtin, M. M. Discourse in the Novel. TheDialogic Imagination: FourEssaysby M. M.

Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. CarylEmerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and

London: U of Texas P, 1981. 81.

Bitzer, Lloyd F. The Rhetorical Situation.Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (Winter 1968):

Devitt, Amy. , Generalizing about Genre. College Composition and Communication 44.4

(1993): 573-86. JSTOR.