Shane T. Lucas
Things That School Couldn't Teach Me: Writing a Kick-Ass Manga
Lucas discusses his process for writing a Manga after finding out that his school writing has not prepared him to write one. After reading Manga, watching anime, and using his art background, Lucas begins to discover what he needs to do to write his own.
Amy Hicks
(Re)Making Memoir: A Story of Small Victories and Even Bigger Failures
Hicks explains the intricacies of and heartache associated with revisiting a genre of writing, the memoir, that she wrote (and abandoned midway through) years ago. Hicks attempts to understand not only the features of the genre, but also how these traits “work” in the larger narrative and how they inform the worldbuilding quality of memoir.
Rob Koehler
Writing for Use: Intersections Between Genre and Usability
Koehler takes up the idea of how genre and usability, when thought about together, can help us write more effectively.
Allie Coursey
The Genre of Reviews: You Want Me To Do What?!?
Coursey describes her struggle writing in an informal manner for a movie theatre review. She discusses how she was taught to use formal language in certain situations and that it was difficult to use casual language for this assignment.
Emily R. Johnston
Playing Well With Others: Demystifying the Workshop Process
Workshop, or peer review, should be beneficial for us as writers, but more often than not, it isn’t. Johnston describes how as writers, we fluctuate between the view that we suck and that our peers suck as writers which ultimately shuts down the productive potential of workshops. Sharing from her own experience in a creative writing workshop, Johnston describes how she learned to see the peer-review process differently.
Niall Nance-Carroll
Working with a Net: How Constraints Can Enable Writing
Nance-Carroll explores how choosing a form with limitations can enable one to write more easily. Using Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on the pleasure of work and his own experience attempting to write in a poem for a creative writing class, he examines the benefits of relying on preexisting constraints to guide one when writing in an unfamiliar genre.
Autumn Jackson
Jackson looks at a blog post by comedian Stephen Fry in order to gain insight into the matter of grammatical prescription or “snobbery.” She looks at the concept of genre to understand how and when certain language rules might apply.
Angela Gentile
Annotated Bibliographies for Dummies
Gentile explains the process of writing an annotated bibliography, basing the steps on her own experience her first year of college. From learning how to pick out useful mastery texts to providing excerpts from her own example, she demonstrates how this genre can truly come in handy.
Kristi McDuffie
McDuffie describes the process of learning the genre of literary analysis and the discomfort of asking for help in learning how to research. She finds that learning a new genre is always going to be somewhat uncomfortable.
Alyssa Shapiro
Learning About the Genres of Biology
Shapiro explores the different types of writing that are encompassed in the biology genre and distinguishes what makes the biology genre different from other writing genres.
Susana Rodriguez
Reading Visual Texts: A Bullet for Your Arsenal
Rodriguez puts her art background to use by deconstructing how images work as visual texts. Using Apple’s iPod banners as examples, she unpacks ideas like subject, iconography, color, composition, and perspective into easily digestible tidbits for use in analyzing other images, advertisements, posters, stickers, graffiti, art, and secret Valentines.
Jamison Lee
Genre Studies, Grice, and Burlesque
Lee addresses North Carolina’s drawls and frog abuses, situates the Gricean maxims as a way to introduce the formal elements of genre studies, explores the deliberate neglect of Gricean maxims and genre conventions in humor writing, and extrapolates the importance—in all writing situations—of a keen awareness of these genre conventions.
Hilary Selznick
Researching One in Six Million
Selznick addresses how the research involved in writing a memoir about her grandmother’s history as a Holocaust survivor differs from the research strategies she learned as an undergraduate student writing a research paper.