, genres evolve and change over time, and each user taking up a genre takes it up just a little bit differently.

He chooses the expletive, which for the moment is effective—the door knocker leaves.

teach you how to be sensitive to genre, the sets, systems, and ecologies in operation in a new writing situation, and how to more capably participate in the work going on in that situation

in ways you’re comfortable with

understanding the genres operating in any setting will also help you to understand better what happens in that setting

the medical history portion of the document is usually followed by insurance information, and a “consent-to-treat statement,” as well as a legal release

your genre system is always partly what you do, and partly what other people who are in your network do

Each person acting within the system of college is part of a situated and intersecting set of texts, which Bazerman calls a genre system.

The collection of texts you list would be the genre set for you as a student.

do graphs and headings alone make a piece of writing a report?

by observing and then imitating the genre features, you’ll produce writing that behaves like the genre.

you should start to become more aware of the genres that are built into the settings in which you currently find yourself—school, work, public life—as well as genres that are at work in other settings you want to be a part of.

human communication itself is both predictable and unpredictable.

a livelier and more engaged response.

Not everyone who writes a proposal will choose to use narrative—the narrative strategy is a way that you might imagine your audience and that audience’s response, aiming for a livelier and more engaged response.

might adapt and reshape the genre, which potentially shifts the genre’s stability

the situation calls for a particular genre. The writer in the situation knows this. So the writer takes up the genre and uses it to respond.

The scientist doesn’t have to figure out whether she’ll write a report or if she’d rather write a song lyric. The Supreme Court justice writing for the majority knows that she will not write a haiku.

Genres are constructions of groups, over time, usually with the implicit or explicit sanction of organizational or institutional power

genre lives in the recurrent situation

while the events that occur in a classroom on any given day might differ in their details from another day, in their overall configuration, the activities of a classroom are remarkably similar over time.

the formal features or markers don’t define the genre

call repeatedly for a kind of writing that answers the needs of that situation

genres.

individual compositions, large or small, that happen incidentally in the course of other activity.

You likely write in response to all kinds of assignments: lab reports, research papers, short summaries, observations, even, sometimes, short narratives.

there’s power in rewriting.

A life story is written in chalk, not ink

You rewrite the history.

the way someone imagines his future seems to affect the way he sees his past, at the same time as his past informs what he expects for the future.

the same regions of the brain are activated when people are asked to remember something and when they’re asked to imagine an event that hasn’t happened yet. On the flip side, a patient with severe amnesia also had trouble imagining the future.

to take pieces of things that have happened to us and reconfigure them into possible futures

The uncertainty of the future makes people uncomfortable, and stories are a way to deal with that.

We’re not trying to make pieces of your life go away.”

you can see anything as a metaphor if you try hard enough

finding some “unity” in your narrative identity is better, psychologically, than not finding it

Imagine a biography that includes not just a narrative but also all the events that failed to foreshadow,

If you’re prone to overthinking, and playing out every possible scenario in your head in advance, you can see foreshadowing in everything.

the world isn’t really organizing itself to give you hints.

patterns will start to emerge.

Any creation of a narrative is a bit of a lie. And some lies have enough truth.”

h eyewitness testimony, where it matters a whole lot whether a person is telling a story precisely as it happened.

different people to see the same event differently

People use stories to make sense of life, but how much do those stories reflect life’s realities?

agency may be good for you, but is it a rational choice?

The more the whole world is designed to work for you, the less you are aware that it is working for you.”

often tell stories about others who helped them in the past

other people play a big role in shaping life stories

if we see other people as bit players instead of protagonists in their own right?

does seeing yourself as a strong protagonist come at a cost to the other characters in your story?

writing them in a narrative form helped more than just listing them

“It’s sort of like people put out a new version of themselves and lived their way into it,”

agency, or feeling like you are in control of your life, and communion, or feeling like you have good relationships in your life.

there are better and worse ways of doing that narrative process for our mental health.

it would be pretty hard to leave all the pages of a life story unwritten.

it can help people find meaning

Wisdom and maturity and cognitive complexity are all things that we value, but they don’t necessarily make you happy.”

It may be true in the moment, but it’s not something that propels someone towards growth

I can only trust myself and rely on myself,

her self-defining memory was that her mother had promised not to have more children, and then broke that promise.

you can repress something but it’s going to come back and bite you if you don’t deal with it

for people who have gone through a lot of trauma, it might be better for them not to autobiographically reason about it at all.

unresolved stories had really negative responses

The redemptive American tale is one of privilege,

having more redemption sequences in a life story was still associated with higher well-being.

the chosen people

Americans have sought to author their lives as redemptive tales of atonement, emancipation, recovery, self-fulfillment, and upward social mobility,

Having redemption themes in one’s life story is generally associated with greater well-being, while contamination themes tend to coincide with poorer mental health.

scripts evolve as culture evolves

flatly happy from then on.”

stigmatize anyone who doesn't follow them to a T

examples of tentpole events that could happen

“go to school, graduate, get a job, get married, have kids.”

for better or worse

master narratives

you plan to have, or elaborately imagine having and never have. The path from outside to inside and back out is winding, dark, and full of switchbacks.

give you less chance for growth.” This is basically the premise of talk therapy.

afraid of how people might react to a story, and they keep it to themselves, they’ll likely miss out on the enrichment that comes with a back-and-forth conversation

So the things I tell you become more accessible to me and more memorable to me

the act of telling is a rehearsal of the story

they've accidentally hit upon something vital.

people tailor the stories they tell to their audiences and the context

I tell the story of the time I crashed my mom’s car much differently now, to friends, than the way I told it to my mom at the time.

Things are lost on 8-year-olds that a 40-year-old picks up, and things that an 8-year-old found compelling and interesting will just bore a 40-year-old to tears sometimes.”

how it changes these people’s lives and the tragedy of this whole thing, it’s completely lost on 18-year-olds.

the appeal of cartoon characters who never get older.

three aspects of the self.

people have developed some of the cognitive tools they need to create a coherent life story.

older adults had more thematic coherence, and told more stories about stability, while young adults tended to tell more stories about change.

People aren’t writing their life stories from  birth, though.

I don’t know how much time you’ve spent around little kids, but they really don’t understand that. I have a child who can really take an hour to tell you about Minecraft.”

James Joyce

Stories are life, life is stories.

different narratives for different realms of her life

autobiographical reasoning”

structuring our lives into stories.”

a way of making sense of the world around us.

narrative seems like an incongruous framing method for life’s chaos

In order to have relationships, we’ve all had to tell little pieces of our story. And so it’s hard to be a human being and have relationships without having some version of a life story floating around.”

even if it’s not 100 percent universal to see life as a story, it’s at least extremely common.

kept a diary for 25 years, and still told me, “Narrative is not a mode that has ever come easily to me.”

Journal-keeping

huge variation in the degree to which they engage in narrative storytelling in the first place.

storytelling animals

a life story that's not a story at all, but some other kind of more disjointed, avant-garde representation of their existence?

a plot that leads from one point to another?

Sometimes in cases of extreme autism, people don’t construct a narrative structure for their lives,”

A life story doesn’t just say what happened, it says why it was important, what it means for who the person is, for who they’ll become, and for what happens next.

Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life

“Life stories do not simply reflect personality. They are personality, or more accurately, they are important parts of personality,

I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc.’”

, the way people choose to tell the stories of their lives, to others and—crucially—to themselves, almost always does have a narrative arc.

plot points of your life

t to contact me BEFORE thedeadline to discuss alternate arrangements

Stay Safe Pledge

take responsibility for your own learning—for meeting deadlines, for seeking out help when you need it,

listen and talk, ask questions and answer them, and expect to learn from everyone else in the class

Your learning depends upon your active participation in the course.

Hypothesis

h Blackboard.

Module 1(rhetorical analysis):10%Module 2 (analytical storytelling):15%Module 3 (visual analysis)20%Module 4 (research & writing for action):25%Discussions/Homework/Notes:30%

maintain a writer’s journal

invention, drafting, and revision techniques.

Close reading helps us to identify and appreciate the tactics of other skilled writers,

Writing well starts with reading well

diverse contexts and recognize issues of power, difference, and materiality.

different audiences and situations

primary and secondary research, utilize various library resources,

range of invention and revision strategies

drawing in additional points of view and generating our own related idea

construct ideas about communities through language.

enhance your own rhetorical flexibility

portable skills

aren’t just academic tasks

critical thinking and explanation

develop and articulate original ideas in your college courses and beyond.