Genre

Charles Bazerman, in Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity Sustems: How Texts Organize Activity and People, seeks to explore the influences that written text has upon individuals and society, to identify the reasoning behind these influences, and also to discover the function that text has in our world. In his analysis, Bazerman uses five key terms in order to develop a lens through which to view the argument: social facts, speech acts, genres, genre systems, and activity systems. Each of these, as Bazerman writes, suggests “how people using text create new realities of meaning, relation, and knowledge” (309). In order to effectively explain these terms to his readers, Bazerman frames his article in a structured, articulate way, and he includes the overarching “college” metaphor as a rhetorical tool.

The issue of modern education arises notably in the articles by Greene, Cooper, and Bazerman. Marilyn Cooper, in her writing, seems slightly condemning of traditional, structured education. Rather than listing facts and adhering to the rigidity of traditional writing, she would prefer innovation and freedom. Though Charles Bazerman also seems to desire innovation and new ideas, he admires structure and formality, and he writes “understanding the form and flow of texts in genre and activity systems can help you understand how to disrupt or change the systems by the deletion, addition, or modification of a document type” (311). Greene seems to border between the ideas of Cooper and Bazerman, since he stresses the importance of structure and framing, but he also stresses the importance of establishing a living connection (like Cooper’s ecological web) between writer-reader-past intellectuals through scholarly writing.

While reading Bazerman’s article, I found myself completely engaged and interested in his ideas because he framed his writing in a structured, well-organized way that drew attention to his main ideas and broke them down with explanation and applicable examples. Though Bazerman uses “genre,” “genre sets,” and “genre systems” to apply to written text, he eventually allows it to evolve into a grander scale: culture and society. Bazerman writes that, “Understanding these genres and how they work in the systems and circumstances they were designed for, can help you as a writer fulfill the needs of the situation, in ways that are understood and speak to the expectations of others” (311). This perspective seems as though it can also be applied to the term “culture” and not just “writing.” Additionally, according to Bazerman, “genres are what we believe they are. That is, they are social facts about the kinds of speech acts people can make and the ways they can make them” (317). Personally, I think that cultures function similarly to genres – culture seems to be created by humans through the meanings that they attach and the interpretations that they draw from the world around them.