Blog 8: Wardle, Miller

Wardle:

The author of “You Can Learn to Write in General” is Elizabeth Wardle, Howe Professor and Director of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University of Ohio. The primary audience of the text is students studying rhetoric, as it was published in Bad Ideas about Writing, a textbook. It implies that “genre” is the situation someone is writing for, and it includes the context, purpose, audience, and expectations for the piece. The main argument of the text is that writing is very context/audience/situation specific, and that there is no such thing as writing in general. This main argument is different from Bitzer, Edbauer, and Herndl/Brown’s because it isn’t regarding a new method for analyzing rhetoric, it is advice for a new mindset about writing. The text’s primary rhetorical purpose is to inform people about the specificity within writing contexts. Another primary purpose is to persuade people to be aware of this specificity, especially by allowing themselves/others to try new types of writing without putting unrealistically high expectations on the new writing styles.

Miller:

“Genre as Social Action” was written by Carolyn R. Miller, who is a retired Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication from North Carolina State University. This text was intended for fellow academics in the field of rhetoric, because it was published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech. Miller explains her understanding of genre on page 163. She writes that genre is understood through its social context/situation and the rules that govern that situation. The main argument Miller is making is her understanding of genre as social action. This argument differs from those in Bitzer, Edbauer, and Herndl/Brown because it is centered around a new way of classifying texts into genres rather than a different way of analyzing the text itself. The primary rhetorical purpose of the text is to inform the audience of Miller’s definition of genre and to persuade them to incorporate this view into their studies of genre and rhetoric, especially by evaluating the validity of other genre claims.