entry 12: reflecting on all of the genres

 

Well, I can honestly say that at the beginning of this semester, I was pretty confident in my understandings of the genres discussed in Tompkins (2012) that we were going to be exploring in our Genre Expert workshops. But after actually experiencing these workshops, I realized I still had a lot to learn! The genres we explored more deeply this semester were:

• Personal writing
• Journals
• Letters
• Descriptive writing
• Persuasive writing
• Narrative writing
• Biographical writing
• Poetry writing

Four Types of Biographical Writing

At the start of this class, I was confident in my understanding of the biography genre, but through the Genre Expert workshop led by my peers Marissa, Maddison, and Holly, my eyes were opened to the different types of life stories that fall within this genre (as I mentioned in my Entry 11). This image (pictured to the right) was included in their handout, which helped me to think about the characteristics of the different forms of biographies. I think choosing to create each type of writing as a puzzle piece that fits into this genre was really creative. My peers also emphasized that these categories are flexible.

The activity that deepened my understanding of these four types of life stories was through viewing our mentor texts. Through our "Dive Deeper" activity, we were asked to identify what general information we could gather about the person within our text (i.e., date of birth, where they are from, where they live now, favorite activities/hobbies/sports) as well as consider the form of our text and how that impacts the person's story. I found identifying the form to be difficult and started to second guess myself. I realized through this activity that if this is something that I find challenging, my future students will most likely find this to be challenging as well. I also learned that form impacts the story, because if the author of the text was writing about themselves, it may seem more accurate than if someone else was writing about another person's life.

I also feel like I learned a lot more about poetry than I thought I needed to. Poetry has always been intimidating to me, and I know a lot of students feel that way. But my peers Brenna, McKenzie, and Taylor L. really drove home the fact that poetry is supposed to be fun and creative, not stressful and limiting. I realized just how easily poetry can be when you are given some structure. For example, my peers had us all write about a special place or event using our five senses. A special event for me was when I attended the Cheerleading Worlds in 2019. We first brainstormed words/phrases that came to mind for each sense, and then wrote a poem. Our peers provided us with sentence starters, but the rest was up to us. I'm actually very proud of how my poem turned out! This is what I came up with:

I hear the crowd cheering, our music blaring.

I see blinding stage lights.

I smell multiple brands of hairspray.

I taste the gallon of water I'll chug after hitting our routine.

I feel my body shaking from all of the adrenaline and excitement.

Writing this poem put me right back on the Worlds stage and allowed me to remember exactly how I felt in that moment. Writing this poem really helped me realize that writing poetry does not have to be this daunting, overwhelming, difficult task. It can be as simple as identifying a special moment/place and using your five senses to describe it.

I also learned through these Genre Expert workshops that mentor texts greatly assisted my understanding of the genre I was exploring. I think reading about the different genres in Tompkins (2012) gave us a lot of information, but actually seeing the aspects of a genre within a text was very helpful. I think finding mentor texts for each genre we explored was crucial to my understanding of what makes each text a strong example of that specific genre.

I truly feel that I was able to develop a deeper understanding of each genre we explored, and I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to both participate as well as lead these Genre Expert workshops!