Reflecting on the Genre

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Some genres, like position papers, have a broad general audience, composed of people whose knowledge of current controversial issues varies widely. Other genres, like essays analyzing stories, are highly specialized, read and written by a comparatively small group of people who share certain kinds of knowledge and interests.

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Students in English courses learn certain ways of reading and writing about stories, and they also discover what kinds of analyses are likely to interest their readers—people engaged in an ongoing conversation about stories and other works of literature. They need to know some of the specialized vocabulary used in writing about literature, such as point of view, as well as the critical approaches to analyzing stories they find useful. English instructors determine which approaches their students need to become familiar with, and they introduce these subjects in lectures and class discussions. They choose stories to read and assign essays to write that will give students opportunities to use these approaches.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a page or two about your experience analyzing literature in this course and, if relevant, in other English classes. Connect your ideas to your experience with writing a short story analysis and to the readings in this chapter. In your discussion, you might consider one or more of the following questions:

  1. List some of the subjects you and your classmates discussed in class and wrote about. Where did these subjects come from—class discussion, the Ways In box on pp. 475–78 in the Guide to Writing, your instructor’s questions or lectures, other English classes?
  2. Consider whether any subjects were deemed by your instructor or other students to be uninteresting or not appropriate for analyzing stories. Why were these subjects rejected? Do you agree with their exclusion?
  3. Did you become part of the conversation about the literature you studied? If so, what made you feel most connected to the stories (or other works) you read and the discussions about them? If not, can you name anything in particular that made you feel left out?

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