Blog Post #7

The author of you can learn to write in general is Elizabeth Wardle. Elizabeth Wardle is a Howe Professor in English and Director of the Roger and Joyce Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University. The primary audience seems to be writing students like us. Wardle implies in the text that genre is the context, audience, purpose, medium, history, and values of the community that effect what the writing needs to be based in the situation. The main argument of the text is that there is no such thing as writing in general, you are always writing about something with at least some sort of specification. Wardle is implying that there is always a purpose, no matter what you’re writing about, which I feel is pretty similar to Bitzer’s and Edbauer’s ideas. The primary rhetorical purpose of the text is to teach or to inform.

The author of Genre As Social Action is Dr Carolyn Rae Miller who was a long serving member in NC State’s department of English. She founded and taught the first graduate courses for rhetoric and composition at NC State. The primary audience of this text appears to be other high level rhetoricians, as it was published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1984. Miller implies that “genre should be limited to a particular type of discourse classification, a classification based in rhetorical practice and consequently open rather than closed and organized around situated actions” (Miller 155). The main argument of this text is to disprove other rhetoricians’ ideas of genre and to clearly state Miller’s idea of genre. I think the main argument is similar to Edbauer’s ideas, since Miller believes that the rhetorical practice should be open. The primary rhetorical purpose of this text is to teach or inform.