Chapter 14 Response

Chapter 14 was an interesting read. I admit that I would love to do more multigenre work in the classroom as I think its good for students to engage in different styles of writing for different purposes and different audiences. I feel that exposing students to different genres will give them the confidence to write letters to the boss, or memos at work or newspaper articles, or a number of other purposes. The chapter says that multigenre writing is good for students going on to college however, I would have to disagree with that statement that while a student is in college they will be engaged in a multitude of writing in genres other than scholarly work. Even this blog is something I would consider a "scholarly" sort of writing since I am analyzing the text I have read and I'm quoting/paraphrasing it to support my ideas. Only once in my college career can I recall writing in a genre that isn't on some level scholarly and that was in the one, not required, creative writing class I took. In that class I wrote one short story and five poems. Since that class I really struggle to recall an instance in which I have had to know how to write a descriptive essay, or a newspaper article, or anything of that sort. So based on my college experience I would say that students do not need to know how to engage in multigenre writing in order to succeed in college.

The excerpt in the text about plagiarism I found to be full of good ideas. I was especially interested in the statement that "plagiarism is worth mini-lessons, as in multiple, discussion, and practice". I know that my high school experience with proper citation included one quick "you've done this before right?" and then one half hearted lesson and getting a paper back with the bibliography all marked up. Its my opinion that teachers should spend a portion of class on a few different days going over citation requirements and each of these days their should be some practice of citing sources properly done by the students. Our society places a great emphasis on not stealing the ideas and writing of others. Yet, our teachers/professors encourage and often times require us to quote and paraphrase from the sources. So as a student I can remember feeling lost and terrified of misquoting or incorrectly citing a source. Teachers need to recognize that asking students to quote adds a lot of pressure on the students writing.

Finally I loved the quote at the end of this chapter. "As I see it, one of my jobs is to get the academic community to think in broader terms about what constitutes good academic writing." (89). I think this gets to the heart of why schools (especially colleges) don't bother with multigenre writing. Our society for whatever reason doesn't value nonscholarly work as highly as scholarly work. And for many years now people view anything that isn't a research paper as largely not scholastic and thus not as teach worthy. However, this chapter makes the argument that multigenre writing can be every bit as scholastic as a research paper and can actually include elements of a research paper in much craftier and interesting ways. For example I would much rather write and read a paper on king Richard that contains facts but is composed in a short story genre. It gives the students more writing freedom and gives the paper a more interesting, yet factual story. If the students enjoy it more then they will most likely learn more from it.