Genre, can be seen anywhere in our daily lives. It’s a method that people can show their opinions or thoughts to others. Therefore, it’s not restricted to a specific form. It can be communication between people through different ways, including writing or writing. It can even be a drama, a portrait, a poetry, etc. In the following paragraphs, I’m going to focus on the genre of writing specifically.
According to the reading, Miller studied a lot on different people’s opinions on genres. Campbell and Jamieson considered inductivity to be one of the characteristics, which is more open class and less restricted by certain frames. On the other hand, Harrell and Linkugel more focused on theory rather than social actions.
After reading this article, I do have some thoughts that can be applied to public writing. In public writing, after we figure out who our target audiences are, we do have to think about how we can reach to our target audience. By this way, studying the characteristics of target audience and how they are going to respond will be very important to make the public writing successful. Therefore, classifying genre by social actions is very helpful in public writing. In addition, in order to make sure to deliver the messages to target audience, it will be a recurring activity. Therefore, studying how past audiences react and respond to our writing will be very helpful for us to think about how we may improve our writing to make it more acceptable to audiences. However, even social responses are really important in public writing, I’m not saying that we don’t need to consider theory or or any restrictions that may affect. Sometimes regarding various topics, there might have specific rules that will affect the style of the writing, which can lead it to work better in a closed set.
In summary, I do agree with Miller’s opinion that current social situation and people’s social actions have a lot impacts on genre of writing. Therefore, when we work on public writing, we do have to figure out what factors in current society can influence our writing and how it will be delivered to target audience.
I enjoyed reading this. My understanding of why we try to understand our audience comes from one of my graduate classes in Christian missions. In order to reach our audience, we must seek to contextualize or package the message in a way that appeals to said audience. For instance, when I tell someone about Jesus, I try to do it in such a way to make it agreeable as possible to them. (The apostle Paul’s argument was that some get offended by this message no matter how it is presented. Still, gospel communicators should not be the offense. If there is offense, let them be uncomfortable with the message and not us.) In contextualization, in no way do I change the inherent gospel message itself, since my presupposition is that there is only one gospel of Jesus Christ; however, I do seek to dress that message up in a way that makes it appealing. There is action on my part when this is done. I survey my audience, and I seek to present the message of Jesus’ salvation in the best way possible to be comprehended. I think we contextualize all the time. Great communicators naturally do this…sometimes without even thinking about it. Amen and amen. 🙂