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Jake Van Pelt

Megan Keaton
ENC 2135
5 August 2016
Project 3 Rationale & Reflection
The first genre that I utilized for the project of composing in non-essayist genre was the
genre of video. Given how much time the average teenager/young adult spends watching a
monitor on average, it only seemed fitting for me to make a video to help teach my suitemate,
who is also a freshman here at FSU, the concept of Genre. With my suitemate, Chad, also being
an aspiring film student, the genre of video would only be more appealing to him. The video is
scripted to portray a scenario where Chad and I are hanging out in the dorm when he remembers
that an assignment might be due quite soon. So he asks to use my computer and after he is
relieved to discover that he thought wrong, he notices my second genre and inquiries about it.
The video is to then play out with myself elaborating to Chad about the main conventions of
genre including style, design, syntax, and audience with the video ending with Chad saying that
he seems to have a good bit better of an understanding of genre in this context than he did, as
when he first read the title, he thought that the genre was referring to the genre of things such as
action and Sci-Fi genres in film. With regards to the level of success the video would have in
actually teaching Chad the concept of genre, I would have to say that the video would have been
quite successful. In the video, I use practical and easy to follow examples of genre as cover all
the basic parts that make up how genre is defined and perceived. The video helps break down the

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whole concept of genre into manageable parts that have their relationship to each other well
explained for the audience (being teenage to young adult persons in general). The video may
have some shortcomings in that it is mainly teaching the genre conventions through verbal rather
than visual means and as such, may make it a bit difficult for some views to understand the
relationship between concepts to some extent. Also, with Chad actually being part of the
presentation as opposed to watching it, he may still have some questions that need to be
answered as the video is basically me being a teacher for him. So for the verbal Ying of the
video, I made the visual Yang of the web page.
The second genre that I utilized to help teach Chad the concept of genre and related
concepts was the genre of a blog on my portfolio website that had a series of images with
explanations about how the images represented a concept of genre. For example, one of the
images was of a Curious George book cover. I posed the question to the viewer about what the
cover made the viewer think of as well as who the audience of the book was likely to be. I then
explained as to how the cover contained certain genre conventions typical for the genre of
childrens books, being the use of bright colorful pictures throughout the book for the design,
simple short sentences for the style, and basic language for the syntax. The blog was designed so
that Chad would be able to view the images and think about what he perceived the images
pertained to with this being an example of genre in the sense that each picture related to
something different from the others. Some of the pictures were of words that had been positioned
to be in the shape of what they were describing. For example, one of the pictures had the words
arranged to form a heart with the actual context of the words being a direct quote from the Bible
from 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 describing love. I included this image to show the words formed in a

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visual sense what they were describing which is like how the genre convention (context of the
words) determines the genre (image the words were shaped as). I believe that the web page
worked quite well as it helped draw comparison to the way genre and genre conventions work by
putting it in a visual context. There still may have been some issues though, primarily relating to
the fact that some of the pictures kind of relied on the viewer having a similar thought process to
what I had when viewing them, regarding what each image was trying to convey and about the
genre conventions that parallel the different aspects of the image.
My understanding of genre has been enhanced by this project as well as by the class in
that I went from thinking of it only as pertaining to style, to now relating to style, design, syntax,
audience. By thinking of genre as the actual medium of communication, I know can better
determine the individual genre conventions of a specific genre. When I view say a brochure, I
now see who its audience is, the design of the pictures in it and of the actual brochure layout
itself, and the style of text on it. From this I can now be able to conclude for myself what I
believe the brochure is for as well as the type of person it is geared for. With a better
understanding of genre, I also have an increased perception of rhetorical situations and their
effect upon the selection of genre. For example, I now can see why a visual presentation may be
made to review something like a companys finances compared to a simple essay type of paper.
The concept of rhetorical situation also makes a good bit more sense now than it did when I
entered the class as now I understand that rhetorical situation refers to the audience and what is
needing to be addressed, from which the genre is then determined in preparing to respond to the
rhetorical situation. With social media and interconnectedness being major factors in todays
world, various new rhetorical situations appear that I can better understand. Take for example

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why to contact a good friend, a person chooses to simply send a picture of them self in a
Snapchat as opposed to sending a text. It could be attributed to the saying that a picture is worth
a thousand words, however if the rhetorical situation is more closely examined, one can see as to
why a simple picture was chosen over the text. With the picture simply getting a picture from a
friend indicates that they wish to communicate. When people get to know each other for a while,
they soon come to better understand that person and the unique behaviors about them, like how a
person with a certain facial expression may elicit a humorous response from the onlooker who
interprets that the face means that the person is unamused. With the two people being good
friends, the rhetorical situation does not necessitate the use of text to communicate because facial
expressions can be used instead due to the fact that the person receiving the picture can gain the
information they need solely from the senders facial expression. During the project, I gained
further insight into rhetorical situation when Mrs. Keaton requested that I think more about the
ways that Chad and I communicate when I had said that I intended to make a PowerPoint and a
Prezi. After giving it some thought I settled on writing a video script and making a blog on my
portfolio website to explain and elaborate upon the concept of genre and rhetorical situation. I
choose these two genres because Chad is wanting to be a film major and so during the scripting
of a video, I would be able to explain genre to him in order for him to understand the context of
genre in the video when I was describing it. As for the second genre, I picked it because I know
that Chad often browses blogs containing videos and/or pictures online on various websites. So
by formatting my blog to be similar to a presentation, I felt as though Chad would be able to able
to scroll down the page and follow with ease, eventually coming to understand genre in a manner
quite similar to that of my own. The project did complicate my methods by which I compose as I
was forced to take up genres quite different from the traditional genre of an essay. While at first

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this was a challenge, after giving the circumstance some thought, I reached the conclusions I did
about what genres would be best for teaching Chad, to which they were both successful
endeavors. The blog took a good bit more thought than the video did as I had at first defined the
genre as being that of a web page. As Mrs. Keaton pointed out however, this was an incorrect
label, as the web page that I had made didnt contain any hyperlinks and was merely a long
string of posts which currently matches the genre of a blog more than it does the genre of a
web page. It did take some time to reach this conclusion I must admit as the second genre to
come to mind was a thread, but it wasnt a thread because it didnt contain comments from
anyone else. I decided to leave in the initial genre posts on the blog as a means of explanation
for anyone who hadnt seen the video to be able to understand what the term genre was referring
to when it was mentioned during the posts pertaining to rhetorical situation.