UMaine ENG 201: Rethinking Genre When we think of genre, the thought is likely to go to categories like fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, mystery, and so on. However, genre is much more than the plot of a story. Genre is integrated into every situation and piece of writing, or reading, we encounter in every area of our lives. Amy Devitt, a 21st century scholar, argues in her essay “Generalizing About Genre”, that the “container model” of genre is much too restrictive, and makes genre a “static concept” as opposed to the dynamic view Devitt calls for (Devitt 573-574). The University of Maine offers a course called “ENG 201: Strategies for Writing Across Contexts”. This English course, which builds off the groundwork of ENG 101, seeks to put Amy …show more content…
This concept requires students to acknowledge all parts of the situation they are writing for. As Devitt describes, “genres construct and respond to situation; they are actions” (578). Students must actively engage with each of the PACT concepts in order to make decisions about their writing. Over the course of the semester, there are three overarching areas that are covered, personal/civic, workplace and academic. In combination, these three units reflect the goal of the course that is to separate academic writing from the other types of writing that students will more often participate in throughout the rest of their …show more content…
Devitt’s definitions of these two terms have a more fluid definition than the weight that is put on them throughout the academic writing world. The second unit within ENG 201, the workplace capstone, played with Devitt’s lighter definitions by challenging students to explore what writing in the workplace meant, and what that means for genre. Students had to choose a very specific form of writing that they were likely to encounter in their career pertaining to their major and put into groups, each member with wildly different forms. The groups were to create a document of any form of their choosing, and perform a compare and contrast analysis. The point of this assignment was to pick an appropriate form to integrate three to four very different documents in. This project helped release some of the boundaries places on certain genres. For example, a journal article is often used to describe a scientific study performed, however in this case, it was used for comparative discussion of workplace