“…Autumn, your word is genre…” The words resounded through me as I was told the topic of my next project for my WEPO class. As the professor listed off the other names in the class and what their words were I tried to think about what my word meant. What was it that made genre important in a class that had focused mainly on rhetoric and composition to this point. Well genre to me made me think immediately of Fantasy and Science Fistion considering that they were my favorite types of genre.
It turns out that I didn’t have much time to think because as soon as she had finished listing what word went where she started talking about what the project was about, what it focused on and what she wanted to see. I needed to pay attention to this and take notes so that hopefully I wouldn’t end up doing it all wrong.
A few minutes later as I was walking out of class I started thinking again about the newsletter project I had just been assigned. I knew what a newsletter was, how to make one, what it needed to look like and what program to use on the computer to do it having seen my dad make monthly ones for the “Palm Beach County Woodturners Club” for years. He always used Microsoft publisher to make it and I could have him look over my product when I’m done to make sure that it looked alright.
I stumbled over my own feet, I tend to do that often and it temporarily broke me from my train of thought. I was on my way back to my dorm to eat and read the assigned reading for the Visual Rhetoric class I had later in the day. I didn’t get back onto the subject of my new project until the next day during my lunch break between my first two classes and my last two classes. I began to think again that I really didn’t know my word. I mean I didn’t know it in the context that was required of the project. So opening up a few windows on my laptop I began to search for the meaning of the word genre. On google a few sites popped up but none of them looked like they would give me any more information than I already knew so I turned to the Jstor search.
“Well that looks promising…” a long list of different articles popped up before my eyes. Now I just needed to read a couple to get a basic view of what my topic is about. After perusing a few I felt no closer to my goal than I had before. There was no definition mentioned for genre and none of the articles mentioned rhetoric.
I was a little nervous during the next class. We were supposed to have a page of information about our project and while I did have some information about genre I didn’t have anything that could really be used for the project. It just have me a framework to work with. Knowing that if I didn’t ask I would be in trouble I swallowed my pride and stayed after to ask if she could advise me on what to do.
We were also supposed to come up with a basic idea of how we were gonna set our newsletter up and I had no idea how I was going to make what I needed to say into an 800 word assignment. It was a daunting thought.
I was so happy and relieved when instead of telling me to find out for myself she mentioned a few different theorists that I could look up that had written on the subject of genre. With a lightened heart and a new bounce in my step I walked out the door and didn’t think any further about the project until Sunday night. The first rough draft was due Tuesday and after finishing everything else I had to do for my other classes I could now look up the theorists she had mentioned.
On Jstor the only one that popped up was Amy Devitt. I was able to look at ten of her articles but none of the others. Luckily of the other articles I had found before one of them had extensively quoted genre theorists and their definitions of genre. Reading a little bit of Devitt’s work I had to say that I liked the way she phrased things. It made a lot of sense.
Then it was Monday night and I had to make a rough draft. I didn’t have publisher on my computer so I had no choice but to use a school computer. As soon as my classes were over for the day I headed to Dirac. I wanted to be in the library closest to where I live because I get nervous walking around at night by myself on campus and I didn’t know how long putting the rough draft together would take.
As soon as I got a computer booted up I opened up a publisher document and went looking for the newsletter templates. “Oh my god. I can’t believe there are so many.” There were so many options available for a newsletter and all of them could be edited to have a different color scheme, box structure or page length. I spent a while looking at all of the possibilities and settled on one that had been created by a student on campus. I needed one that would be attractive looking for an incoming freshman and official looking enough to make it look like I knew what I was talking about. The colors were not that great so I looked for a color scheme that would be more androgynous and a little brighter. I found it and opened the document.
Blankness, utter and complete white, is what greeted me. Like the surface of a new canvas or a blank piece of paper. It was a surface for me to place my ideas on and hope to get a good grade from. I messed around with some stuff like the fonts and came up with a title.
The first article was a little tricky, I needed to define my key word but do so in an interesting enough way that I could keep my audience’s attention. I rewrote it so many times that my fingers started to hurt. I still wasn’t happy with it but by that point I was getting too aggravated to continue with it. So I moved on to trying to find a picture, something to help keep people interested. I managed to find a word art that showed literary genres written in different styles.
Now I moved on to my next course of action. I had written about what genre was but I didn’t give a reason as to why they needed to know so I used another article to try and explain why knowing what genre was would help someone during their college career. That article was easy to finish and then it was on to the next one.
For the third article I wanted to write about the two main types of genre that I had read about. I started the article but after a paragraph I got a little bored with it and moved onto the fourth article. By that point it was getting kind of late and I was hungry having not eaten since breakfast. I hurriedly wrote about the woman who suggested that we add some digital media to the types of literary genre because they have become so popular. I tried to make it sound nice and flow right but I was tired and worried about when the library would close. The bibliography was hurriedly written and then I was off to google to look up pictures that I could use for the articles. After debating with myself I used clip art for the fourth article and decided to look for comics/cartoons for the others. I thought that they would be the best things to use for the audience I was aiming for. I didn’t have 800 words when I was done but I managed to get at least 500 which was a good starting point to get feedback on.
I had a bit of an adventure when I tried to print. I didn’t know how to use the library printer and was mumbling curses under my breath at the system by the time I had finally managed to print it. Done for the night I hurried back to my dorm right before the library closed clutching my notebook with my project safe inside.
The next day I handed in the rough draft and waited with baited breath for it to be handed back. I knew for sure that it was going to pale in comparison to everyone else’s and that she would tell me to start all over. When it was handed back at the end of the lesson I couldn’t contain the large smile when I saw that the notes were only good things.
After that I got so caught up in other things that I forgot about the project until the Friday before it was due. I got back to the library Monday, the night before it was due to finish it. It took a while and a lot of hair pulling, researching, eye rubbing and caffeine intakes for me to get it to where I wanted it to be. I sent a copy of it in an email to my father who read through it and fixed the grammar. After he was done I rechecked it several times to make sure that everything was filled in before I sent it off to print. And after looking at it sitting in my hands I couldn’t help but be proud of what I had made and was filled with anticipation on what people’s thoughts of it would be. As I lay down that night I did so with the knowledge that I did good work.
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