Reflecting on What You Have Learned; Reflecting on the Genre

THINKING CRITICALLY

To think critically means to use all of the knowledge you have acquired from the information in this chapter, your own writing, the writing and responses of other students, and class discussions to reflect deeply on your work for this assignment and the genre (or type) of writing you have produced. The benefit of thinking critically is proven and important: Thinking critically about what you have learned will help you remember it longer, ensuring that you will be able to put it to good use well beyond this writing course.

Reflecting on What You Have Learned

In this chapter, you have learned a great deal about this genre by reading several profiles and writing one of your own. To consolidate your learning, reflect not only on what you learned but on how you learned it.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a blog post, a letter to your instructor or a classmate, or an e-mail message to a student who will take this course next term, using the writing prompt that seems most productive for you:

  • Explain how your purpose and audience—what you wanted your readers to learn about your subject from reading your profile—influenced one of your decisions as a writer, such as what kinds of descriptive detail you included, what method of organization you used, or the role you adopted in writing about your subject.

  • Discuss what you learned about yourself as a writer in the process of writing this profile. For example, what part of the process did you find most challenging? Did you try anything new, like getting a critical reading of your draft or outlining your draft in order to revise it? If so, how well did it work?

  • If you were to give advice to a fellow student who was about to write a profile, what would you say?

  • Which of the readings in this chapter influenced your essay? Explain the influence, citing specific examples from your profile and the reading.

  • If you got good advice from a critical reader, explain exactly how the person helped you—perhaps by questioning your perspective in a way that enabled you to refocus your profile’s dominant impression, or by pointing out passages that needed more information or clearer chronology to better orient readers.

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Reflecting on the Genre

Profiles broaden our view of the world by entertaining and informing us with portraits of people, places, or activities. But even effective profiles sometimes offer a limited view of their subjects. For example, the impulse to entertain readers may lead a profile writer to focus exclusively on the dramatic, colorful, or humorous aspects of a person, place, or activity, ignoring the equally important humdrum, routine, or otherwise less appealing aspects. Imagine a profile that focuses on the dramatic moments in an emergency-room doctor’s shift but ignores the routine cases and the slow periods when nothing much is happening. Such a profile would provide a limited and distorted picture. In addition, by focusing on the dramatic or glamorous aspects of a subject, profile writers tend to ignore economic or social consequences and to slight supporting players. Profiling the highly praised chef in a trendy new restaurant, a writer might not ask who the kitchen workers and waitstaff are, how the chef treats them, or how much they are paid.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a page or two explaining how the genre prompts you to think about the subject of a profile. In your discussion, you might consider one or more of the following:

  1. Consider whether any of the profiles you have read glamorize or sensationalize their subjects. Do they ignore less colorful but centrally important people or everyday activities? Is this a problem with your own profile?

  2. Write a page or so explaining what the omissions signify. What do they suggest about the readers’ desires to be entertained and the profile writer’s reluctance to present the subject in a more complete way?