“Genre,” CR 44-46
Rose, “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block,” CR 298-310
“Style,” CR 47-50
Reische, “The Importance of Making Dumb Mistakes in College” CR 208-209 OR Gillam and Wooden, “Post-Process Models of Gender: The New Man in Disney/Pixar,” CR 160-170
following the these
Mike Rose’s “Rigid Rules” offers an opportunity to examine a genre central to academic writing – the academic article. You’ve likely already encountered this genre in your own research, as this type of writing is foundational to making academic arguments and in creating new knowledge. First, use the guide to genre analysis in your reading from this week to conduct a genre analysis of Rose’s article. Next, find a research article from your own discipline (i.e. from biology, political science, accounting, psychology, literature, etc.) and analyze it using the same questions as your guide as well, noting any similarities and differences based off your analysis of Rose’s article. For this assignment, its important to focus on how your samples (Rose’s article and the one you find) make arguments, and less on the arguments they are making in and of themselves. In other words, you don’t need to focus on the findings so much as how the authors present and communicate their findings. Describe what you see as the defining conventions of the research article as a genre. To do this, it’s important to think critcally about similarities in how your two samples are written and how they make their arguments. What type of language do they use? What kind of logic drives their arguments? Are there any similarities in the form of the articles? Etc. After discussing the similarities you noticed, turn your attention to the differences. Did you find any differences that might shed light on how different disciplines take up and produce the genre of the research article? Make sure to explain your answers and offer support for your claims using details from your samples or readings.
