V's Pick #22: Genre and The Invention of the Writer by Anis Bawarshi

I took my exam yesterday - about four total hours of typing and 22 pages later, I felt (feel) pretty good about it. I'll know my results in about three weeks.

The thing that was most shocking about what was asked of me was that in whole, I read about 7500 pages of text to prepare and of the questions I needed to answer, probably only used about 30% of what I now know. Tricky, tricky. So, suffice to say, I've got a lot of stuff still floating around in my head and I would really like it to stay.

One thing I don't see leaving my filled brain is Bawarshi's attempt to reconcile invention in the first-year writing classroom by teaching about genres. It makes SO much sense to me - teach students the game about approaching each new writing assignment by teaching them how to recognize genres and then how to adhere to them. She gives an example in this book of some of the final projects students came up with and they're fantastic. One student looked at the genre of wedding invitations. Another, at sympathy cards. Another, grocery lists. We're surrounded by genres and we write accordingly to them, but never (at least in my undergrad experience) are we taught how to look at the world of writing through that lens. The next time I teach FYC (first-year composition) I'm going to use this approach - I think it makes room for new media as well as keeps the content writing-focused...and one hopes, will provide transferrable knowledge students can use in the university and the workplace.

Bawarshi is a great writer and this book was a gem to me. She's sensitive to creativity and willing to share her approaches in a real and helpful way from teacher-writer to teacher. She's also right, we don't talk about invention enough anymore - and while the classical rhetoricians are dead and gone, we can, as Bolter says, remediate them in order to use their knowledge in conjunction with our present world.