Genre
The following activities introduce students to common professional genres and practice the skills of genre deconstruction and analysis.
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Activities
Cover Letters
- This lesson plan and in-class activity use a series of videos; free-write prompts; and analytic, evaluative, and synthesis-minded discussions about business genres to teach students the basics of genre deconstruction and analysis. Although the current prompt asks students to deconstruct and analyze cover letters, this lesson and activity could work with just about any business document.
Instructions
- This in-class lesson plan walks students through a series of in-class activities designed to introduce students to, develop familiarity with, and harness the affordances of the procedure manual genre using a series of informational guides and worksheet activities. Moving from a basic understanding of procedural constructions (i.e., how to format the steps of a procedure manual) to nuanced manipulations of design, this lesson approaches the procedure manual genre from an accessibility-minded, multimodal stance.
- This generative activity asks students to explore effective instruction writing through the lenses of audience and task analysis, step identification and grouping, style, and design.
Job Advertisements
- This analytic activity gives students practice performing online job research, genre and audience analysis, and self-reflection in a dialectical, “real-world” context. Discussion prompts ask students to critically analyze how individual job ads function as a genre and connect to their own Literacy Narratives. Furthermore, this activity also broadens students’ familiarity with a variety of fields, as students must navigate job ads relevant to both their and their peers’ future professions.
Memos
- This asynchronous activity asks students to write a one-page memo addressed to future BTW students that contains guidelines for how to write a memo. This activity not only hones students’ familiarity with genre expectations in general, but it also 1.) develops their familiarity with the norms of memo-writing, 2.) provides practice with audience analysis, 3.) provides a pointed exercise in class reflection, and 4.) enhances students’ targeted research skills.
- This activity develops students’ understanding of genre and rhetorical situations through an exercise in creative application. After performing some preparatory analysis of and response to provided texts, students compose satiric memos, in which the writer’s purpose is deliberately obscured in “garbage language”—a term discussed in Garbage Language.docx.
Reports
- This revision/redesign activity develops students’ business design skills, revision acumen, and genre analysis. In it, students are provided a sample SWOT report that fails to adhere to many design principles of a business document. Students then apply their understanding of rhetorically effective and formally normative business document design to revise the sample report. Students are asked, however, not to alter any content within the document; this exercise focuses only on design elements, thereby teaching students how to engage in element-specific revision.