Writing Source Review
Genre is a subject that is tightly intertwined with a target audience and this audience completely dictates almost every aspect of an author’s writing. These aspects include everything from your tone, your structure, to even the persona with which you write. Jonathan and Lisa Price, the operators of 'webwritingthatworks.com', state that authors are not the people that start different classes of genre. They state that "a genre is born as a response to an audience's questions, needs, wishes, fantasies." New genres are created when as a particular type of text begins to grow in bulk. The Prices declare that genres are a “response to real or imagined requests from a group, attempting to resolve some of their anticipated problems, to address their needs, or to appeal to some of their passions.”
Web Writing That Works contains an abundance of information pertaining genre and the like. It discusses many things genre besides audience, this includes: the common structural appearance of genres, the tone of different brands of genre, and the personas you have to come into when writing to a particular group of people. Structurally, all genres are similar in that they try to answer some basic question created by the desired audience. If you were writing a biography your question would be, “Who was ‘Important Person’, and what did he do that was special?” When it comes to the tone of your writing you have to follow a specific style that caters to your audience. Web Writing That Works presents an example of a writer for a web magazine that is creating an opinion piece. The Prices state that, “you may feel obliged to include some embarrassingly intimate personal details, a strong emotional appeal, and a sprinkling of intriguingly irrational exclamations. You're adapting your tone to the genre.” When it comes to personas, a genre will generally have certain types already prescribed to it. They provide a very good example for procedures, they allot that “you can give friendly explanations, or you can act as an arrogant geek; you can be expansive or tight-lipped, generous or nasty.”
In comparison to other sites on the web, in terms of genre, Web Writing That Works seems to be far ahead on quality and abundance of material given. Purdue Owl for instance gives very, very little information on their site for genre in writing. The only section to be found, about genre, seems to be two paragraphs in the section “Starting the Writing Process”. It briefly discusses how to incorporate genre and your target audience into your growing paper. The information is very thin though, and is hard to find. The navigation on the site seems to be somewhat disorganized. I felt lost and had to do a word search just to find the paragraph about genre. If I had to choose a website , to learn how to use genre and my audience in my writing it would definitely be Web Writing That Works. They took the cake on ease of use and information delivered.
Covering so many aspects of genre, the web site as a whole is a great resource for improving many varied types of writing, from poems to speeches for large crowds. Navigating the back and forth between web pages is a breeze and the reading is just about as easy. The different sections are very concise and brief yet still seem to have some meat on its bones. Jonathan and Lisa Price really deliver when it comes to the important subject of genre.
Sources:
Lisa and Jonathan Price. "A genre responds to an audience.”
Web Writing That Works. N/A. Web. September 27, 2010.
< http://webwritingthatworks.com/DPatternGENRE01.htm>.
Stacy Weida, Karl Stolley. "Starting the Writing Process.”
Purdue OWL. April 17, 2010. Web. September 27, 2010.