Genre – Type of writing

Genre is a type of writing. This semester, we worked on papers that include six types of genres. they were Technical Description, Lab Report, Technical description, resume, job posting and diagnostic letter. They have different contents, and they have their own conventions to follow.

I engage with this genre throughout the semester by:

• Looked at each genre within the online text
• Looked at samples of genre as a class and performed genre analysis of the samples
• Genre was a newer consideration as assignment required in depth understanding of constructing specific genres, engagement was constant.

(*From Class Note)

How Genre impact my writing?

• Directly impacted the content of the assignments. Each assignment was a different genre, and each genre has own conventions to follow, which I had to pay very close attention to.

 

 

Technical Description was the hardest genre for me to comprehend. When I was assigned the technical description paper, I must admit that I was a little scared. Writing that says I am not well versed in object and process descriptions will be a complete understatement.

The easiest genre I believe was lab report, since I have done many lab reports in Physics and Chemistry classes. The lab report for my project is focusing on the conductivity of different materials. It is an interesting topic. Research is required for writing this lab report. By doing online research, I found that the format of a lab report is important. Since we don’t have any experimental analysis in real, and the data were “imaginary”, to make the report reliable is a challenge.

The Engineering Proposal was also a hard genre, in my reflection I said that

      “This is the first time I have been written an engineering proposal, and it was never done by me. It is a more-than-twenty pages paper, which I haven’t written that long before. Before the courses, I didn’t know how to write a proposal, and I have no idea about the structures that an engineering proposal should have. However, after the classes with decent explanations, I got basic ideas of how to write a good engineering proposal.”

 

I also did resume, job posting and diagnostic letter. These are the totally different type of writings. Resume was considered more “formatted” and less writing. The format is the most important part of a resume. A diagnostic letter, which is a letter that must also follow a format of letter writing.

 

Lastly, the genre has direct impact on contents, which changed the “main text” of a paper. Here is an example:

 

Differences in Table of Contents: Lab Report vs Technical Description vs Engineering Proposal