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.
1 comment:
Present political situation is discussed in the blogs of the left. The authors of these blogs are people who concern about result of future elections. It is very important to them,"Who is going to be next president of the USA?". Trying to analyze all positive and negative aspects of each candidate, bloggers describe different political events and express their attitude toward it. They argue and try to add the point of view of each other. So, most of the blog's entries are a discussion about an event or about public speech of the candidate.
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