Today, we'll be doing some genre analysis. We've already started to talk about genre in class a little. Now we're going to see one in action. We'll be looking at the "blog" genre-- the political blog in particular. First I want you to look at some of the following sites and simply check them out, read a number of posts, think about them. (You will probably want to open different windows so you can easily return to this site):

Blogs of the left:

http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/
http://talkleft.com/
http://www.leanleft.com/

Blogs of the right"

http://volokh.com/
http://cathyyoung.blogspot.com/
http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/
http://michellemalkin.com/
http://adisgruntledrepublican.blogspot.com/

A couple others

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/
http://www.mikhaela.net/


Now think about what most of these posts have in common. What ties them together as a genre? For instance, the autobiography, as a genre, usually features first person narration. It usually takes a reflective tone. And it usually deals with significant events in the writer's life. Those are three commonplaces of the autobiography. Let's see if we can each find a different commonplace for the blog. Post the commonplace as a comment to this post.

The purpose of this activity is to show you how genres work, how whenever we are writing in a certain genre our writing is constrained and created by certain commonplace, and that recognizing those commonplaces can be useful to us as writers.