I attended Session II, Panel IV of the symposium and several genres were addressed. Not only did two of the papers mention the dramatic genres of melodrama and tragedy, and another addressed parody and satire, but three of the papers seemed to me to be in the genre of rhetorical analysis and one of them was a research proposal containing a literature review. I am familiar with all of these genres, mostly because I work at the Writing Center here on campus and I see a lot of these papers throughout the year. I felt like the authors did a good job of adhering to the characteristic of their respective genres, and I was impressed with their level of understanding of these genres when they were asked questions. For example, Dr. Eschenbaum asked the writers what problems they faced when writing their essays, and those people who were writing rhetorical analyses discussed how it was difficult to remove their biases from the essays and judge the style of writing instead of the content. These are key elements to the rhetorical analysis genre because the point of the paper is to analyze the authorâs writing style, there use of ethos, pathos, and logos, and how those are used to persuade the reader, or in the case of one of the papers whose focus was not a text but an SNL skit, the viewer.
   The writer whose essay fell into the genre of research proposal also seemed aware of the need to avoid bias in her writing. She explained how her observational research could be biased because she is the observer, and if the observer had been someone else, perhaps the observations would have been different. She explained that she tried as hard as she could to avoid bias, but that the individual differences between human beings as observers essentially makes it impossible to remove all bias totally. And I was impressed with her understanding of this.
   The best constructive feedback I would give to these writers is that they needed to take bigger risks. The first essay about the SNL skit was riddled with repeated words, and it began to feel as if the author had no other way to say âhigher order thinking,â than simply âhigher order thinking.â But what about âhigher level thinking,â âabstract thinking,â âanalyzing,â âdissecting,â or âinterpreting?â It actually became distracting how often she used this phrase, and her paper would have been much stronger if she varied her language more. The two following essays were about the same article, which centered on Americaâs reaction to 9/11. Because they had the same topic, this may have been unavoidable, but at times they were quoting the exact same lines and using the exact same keywords that they almost sounded like identical essays. This showed me that the voices of the writers werenât really coming through in the papers, but afterwards when they said they tried to avoid using their own voices, I understood why. I think the two writers should have tried to branch out more and find ways to add their own voices/styles without necessarily adding their own opinions. The final essay had more style to it, but I found some of her arguments weak. For example, she didnât really justify why the study on the population of the Root Note should be conducted, why it was important, and the implementation of future research. Even though she mentions these things, her justifications are very vague and do not support her claims as strongly as they could have.
   All in all, I enjoyed listening to the readings and learning about what the College Writing I students are working on. I feel like the course has come a long way from when I took College Writing, as these essays seemed much more advanced than any of the papers I wrote in the course. I donât even recall writing in these genres, which I feel are important to include in the curriculum.Â
dailybridgerton
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
prguitarman
discoholicmusic
gracieabrams
andulkaphoto