Navigating Genres

I found this article very interesting, as I did not realize how big of role genres play in everyday life. They are the basis behind many different forms of human interaction as well as nonverbal communication. Genres can dictate the foundations of a Facebook status, a job interview, or even something as important as the State of the Union Address. Without the components of these genres there would be no direction or structure behind many simple every day actions and routines. Miller discussed that “all genres matter because they shape our every day lives”. I found his example of The Onion to be really accurate as it is designed to make the viewer laugh and come off as some sort of sarcastic joke. Yet, in order to come across this way, the writers needed to understand the context in which they were writing, the readers they were going to gain (or lose), and the overall theme that was being given to this source of news. With this being said, two texts may be able to fit into the same “genre” but look completely different. This is can come across as a sort of Venn diagram. For example there may be a genre that has many different points in common with another, but they are not exactly the same. Therefore, it is good to know the expectations behind the basis of what one will be writing or speaking about before constructing a broad genre. Before this article, I did not realize how much of our social constructs and every day norms were based around the genres that encompassed them. This will help my writing in the future when narrowing down to one subject and not looking at a topic in such a broad sense.