WRT 105 Unit 1 Overview
21st Century Literacies: Genres and Practices
In Unit 1 we will:
- explore how reading and composing are always situated
- engage with the concept of genre by analyzing, composing, and complicating genres
- engage with multimodal composing
- draft, revise, polish a piece of writing [a college application essay & analysis of application process]
- reflect on composing and reading processes
Becoming a more effective composer, regardless of the form your composition takes, means attending to the literacy situation — those elements that inform the choices a composer makes when she is in a position to share her ideas. Composers who have a clear purpose and who understand what their audience needs, for example, are more likely to achieve their desired ends; composers who recognize the conventions of a genre and who develop an awareness of persona will be much more likely to present themselves and their particular ideas in an appropriate manner. In this unit we will grow more familiar with the elements of the literacy situation, and we will take two pieces of writing through the drafting, revising and polishing stages.
We’re going to look particularly closely at what it means to be literate in the 21st century, and how it relates to the “college admissions” process and the genres you are expected to engage in within that process.
Genres circulate all around us. They categorize types of communication (a scholarly article or a newspaper editorial or a personal blog post), they help us anticipate what we’re about to engage with as readers or viewers (a romantic comedy or a slasher film or a rockumentary), they provide us with guidance and expectations when we embark on the work of composing (a lab report or a research profile of a scientist or a poem about nature). Genres are also subject to change, as the values of communities shift, as new technologies come into being, and as composers experiment and innovate. Hybrid genres arise, for example, when composers borrow qualities and characteristics from multiple genres and blend them together. Such a text might surprise or startle readers, but if done well—that is, thoughtfully, strategically, rhetorically—the results can be very effective and pleasing. So in essence, genres both constrain and enable composers.
We’re going to examine and analyze a few different genres in this unit, and draft, revise, polish and create one particular composition—a college admissions essay. The goal of the unit is not to become an expert writer of one genre (nor an expert on college admissions writing), but to develop awareness and flexibility as writers—across genres and across modalities.
Much of the writing in the unit will be informal writing—that is, writing for the purposes of learning, exploring, testing, practicing, reflecting, and engaging more deeply with readings. I call this invention work. The invention work is crucial to the unit and the course as a whole, and as such it carries real weight in the course.
The polished admissions essay, your analysis of the admissions process and your invention work are together worth 20% of your final grade. Your reflection is worth 10% of your final grade.
All work is due on Oct 5.
Getting In: A closer look at the college admissions process
The most recent version of the College Common Application may appear straightforward and simple, but as a genre, it presents the composer with a very complex literacy situation. What does one need to know to successfully complete the application? What purposes does it serve, and for whom? Who has the most access to the “rules” of this composing situation, and why? What larger social, ideological and cultural contexts at work in the application process?
During this unit, we’ll be reading about some of the complexities and histories in the college admissions process. We’ll analyze this composing moment as a “literacy situation” and work on composing, revising and polishing a version of the “college entrance essay” using the prompts provided. In addition to the polished college entrance essay, you will compose 750-word blog entry using your experiences in this application process and our shared reading to say something new and interesting about the college application process and/or the genre of the college admissions essay.
The Blog Entry
In addition to your polished “college admissions essay,” you will compose a 750 word blog entry for unit 1 which shines a new light on some aspects of the college admissions process, and provides your reader with fresh ways to think about the genre of the “admissions essay” within the process. Along with your own experiences, the readings from the unit will help you develop ideas for your claims. For example, Gladwell’s New Yorker article “Getting In” he complicates readers’ notions of the college admissions process by demonstrating the social, historical and cultural aspects guiding admissions decisions in the Ivy League. June Jordan’s “Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan” invites readers to come to terms with important dynamics between language and identity. And James Warren’s “The Rhetorical of the College Application Essays” suggests that students who come from a background that allows them to understand the implicit message in the prompts of the application essay hold a significant advantage in the process.
Here are some questions that might help to get your thinking started toward the blog post:
- How are the prompts for the essay connected to the actual purpose of the writing? In other words, is there a “seems like X, but could actually be Y” at work in these prompts? How so?
- What is it like to be facing the task of writing the college admissions essay? How does it feel? Why? What’s at stake as the composer of this genre?
- What the larger (historical, cultural, social) context surrounding the composing of this genre and of the admissions process more generally? Why might this be important to consider?
- Who is the audience for the genre? What complicates notions of audience in this composing task?
- What part does the entrance essay play in college admissions?
- What part might language and identity play in the writing of the college admissions essay?
- What are the rules of the game, the conventions of the genre of the college entrance essay, and what happens when the writer breaks them? Does it matter whether it is intentional?
- What part does “persona” play in the genre of the college entrance essay? How might this be important?
The Reflection
A reflection is a genre specific (but not exclusive) to the field of composition. Composition instructors often ask students to write reflections at strategic moments in the course—moments when it seems most appropriate to step back, review all of your work, and think critically about what you are learning and why what you’re learning is significant.
You might think of this as an activity that is similar to other activities outside of school that are reflective, but aren’t called “reflection.” When a sports team watches film from a game, they are looking to deliberately break down each play and understand how it unfolded—this in order to learn from how they performed in the prior game in order to perform better in the next. This gives them a very different perspective from their own inevitably clouded, undocumented memories of the game.
So a reflection is not a narrative of what you did, but an analysis of what you did and learned and why it matters. The distinction is crucial: your teacher doesn’t really need a recap of what you did, right? But a teacher does need you to point out what you found most meaningful in the work of the course. Your analysis of what was meaningful becomes the focus of the reflection, and all of your composing throughout the unit becomes the pool of data or evidence for supporting your analysis. All of that work—notes at the end of class, for example, reading responses, blog posts, quick-and-dirty research results, free writes, drafts and revisions and false starts and doodles and noticings—is worthy of your attention and analysis. What does all of that stuff say about you as a composer?
Getting Started with Your Reflection
In chapter 1 of Everything’s a Text, Melzer and Coxwell-Teague write that,
All acts of literacy are situated—they are constructed by the specific situation you find yourself in as a reader or composer. This literacy situation includes the role you play as the composer of a message, the form you compose in, your audience, and the social and cultural contexts for you and your audience (3-4).
For this reflection, I would like you to explore Melzer and Coxwell-Teague’s explanation of “acts of literacy,” drawing on your composing experiences in this first unit of the course. Your reflection will help me appreciate and more fairly evaluate all of your work in the unit (from daily exercises to polished products). It will also help me assess not just what you produced, but what you learned. And finally, your reflection is an opportunity for you to continue to showcase your critical thinking skills, particularly your ability to think deeply about practices and concepts specific to effective composing.
The following prompts may give you a starting point for thinking and writing; I do not expect you to answer all of them nor use them to outline your reflection:
- How does an understanding of genre impact your composing?
- What do you now understand about the “social and cultural contexts” for composing?
- In what ways do your texts for this unit reflect your complex understanding of audience?
- In what ways do the texts you have composed this unit reflect the contributions and/or perspectives of other readers and writers (classmates, teachers, friends, writing consultants, etc)?
- How do the composing concepts we engaged with this unit encourage you to think about your literacy practices outside of school?
- What are you realizing about the school writing/personal writing/public writing divide as a result of your work this unit?
- In what ways do your essay and blog post reflect your new skills and awarenesses as a composer and designer?