Submit Your Assignment – Paper Two: Genre Analysis
Choose one of the following genres of writing:

Yelp! review
Entry on a baking/cooking blog
Twitter “essays” (<link is hidden> “tweet-storm”)
Film/book/game/music review
Suggest your own genre of writing–this option needs instructor approval.
Purpose:

For this assignment, do not evaluate (pass judgment on) the representative works (the examples that you’re quoting from to support your thesis).

Outline three basic elements that seem to be characteristic of the genre—refer to the representative works (the examples that you’re quoting from) to help illustrate your claims.

Address the following:

Thesis. Here’s a basic template to use/modify: An exceptional (effective?) review (blog, tweet-storm, etc.) must include ___, ___, and ___.
How does each element work within the genre to achieve a specific purpose?
How do the different elements relate to one another to achieve this purpose?
How do the different elements help the writer reach a particular audience?
Your goals for this essay are to discover the nuances of genre and purpose, to give your reader a new/more precise understanding of the components of the genre. You may think of this assignment as a more in depth “how to” or instructional essay.

Additional Requirements:

follow MLA format (12 point, Times New Roman, double-spaced) and use MLA guidelines for in-text citations and works cited page
refer to the representative works with summary, paraphrase, and direct quotes
Final draft is due to Canvas no later than 11:59 pm on the due date.

Reverse Engineering Genres
Perhaps one of the best ways to learn about how genres work, and to figure out what distinguishes one kind of writing from another, is to reverse engineer a category of writing. In other words, we will be analyzing a mode/category of writing in order to discover some of its more pertinent characteristics.

For your Paper Two, you will choose from a short list of genres of writing, and then read many different examples of that writing, taking notes about some of the characteristics that you notice.

You should pay attention to the following when you’re reading around in your chosen genre:

Audience: what do the writers assume about their readers? What kind of information are readers looking for in this kind of writing (do they want to learn how to do something? are they looking for information, to be persuaded, to be taught . . . ?)
Tone: what level of formality and/or specialty language is used? Do the writers provide definitions for key terms or explain insider language? What does this tell you about audience or purpose?
Purpose: what does the writer want to achieve?
Organization: are there recurring patterns across the samples of writing in your selected genre?
As you take notes, think about how your chosen genre approaches these universal elements to written communication. In other words, how different is the writer’s approach to audience/tone/purpose/organization between your chosen genre and, say, a work email, a term paper, or a news feature?

You can find plenty of examples of genre analysis essays online, but try reading briefly through <link is hidden>

Welsh’s genre analysis of the ten-minute play
Paper Two Essentials and Organization
Essentials for Paper Two
Thesis: You need a clear claim along the lines of “To write a meaningful game review, you must include ___, ___, and ____.”

Audience: You probably wouldn’t need to explain how a Yelp review is written to an Elite Yelper. But you might have to explain it to, say, my dad so that he could more easily find and read a quality review or even write his own.

Purpose: Think about why it might be useful, important, or interesting to learn about the genre you’re writing <link is hidden> your reader something to think about that will help them find value in your work beyond the rather narrow scope of a genre analysis.

Page count: You have three examples to draw from for each convention/quality—that’s roughly nine paragraphs right there. (See outline examples below.)

Possible Outline of Structure
If you’re having difficulty organizing your paper, here are two possible organizational patterns you could employ. You do NOT have to use them!

Point-by-point: Organize your discussion of your source material according to the criteria you discover about your genre. Each line might be its own paragraph, depending on what material you have collected:
Introductory paragraphs
Criterion One (<link is hidden> playful tone)
Discuss examples of tone in source one.
Discuss examples of tone in source two.
Discuss examples of tone in source three.
Criterion Two (<link is hidden> use of images and funny captions/hashtags)
Discuss imagery in same pattern as above.
Criterion Three (<link is hidden> hypertext links)
Discuss hypertext in same pattern as above.
Concluding paragraphs

Block: Organize your discussion of criteria that you have discovered about your genre according to the sources you’ve found. Each line might be its own paragraph, depending on what material you’ve collected:

Introductory paragraphs
Source One
Discuss examples of tone
Discuss examples of images and funny captions/hashtag
Discuss examples of hypertext links
Source Two
Follow same pattern as above.
Source Three
Follow same pattern as above.
Concluding paragraphs
I have chosen the above criteria as examples; you should use those criteria that you discovered for yourself.