4. Delivery—Writing Genres, Modes, and Conventions
What Forms Can My Message Take?
In the last module, we began thinking about the writing that happens in the communities and publics we are part of. We positioned listening to communities and publics as a means of researching and developing ideas to write about—identifying an exigence. This practice of listening, reading, and engaging may even change your perspective on topics you may have researched or learned about in other ways, and may give you a new sense of purpose in writing about them. We spent the last module thinking about how to track those ideas and perspectives in order to identify a conversation that you might want to contribute to through your own writing.
In this module, you will refine your sense of your intention as a communicator. You will also learn to consider your audience to ensure that your message effectively reaches them and has the intended effect. After all, the “academic essay” is not actually the most effective form for much of our public writing to take. In fact, even the “academic essay” is itself quite variable, changing in form and expectations across disciplines and other contexts. It is important to recognize the importance of audience, purpose, and design in writing in order to practice flexible, effective writing skills that will serve you in the diverse writing tasks you will face in the future.
What Are We Doing in This Module?
In this chapter, we will return to Ashley Holmes’s text on public writing, now shifting from a focus on “invention”—or coming up with ideas—to considerations of arrangement, style, and delivery. As part of this shift, we will introduce concepts like delivery, genre, and multimodality. Understanding these will help you recognize, critically analyze, and ultimately produce a diverse and nuanced range of texts, including those in written, spoken, and visual modalities.
How Will We Do It?
We begin by introducing and practicing the concepts of genre and modality before returning to Ashley Holmes to continue your planning and composing about the public issue you began working with in the last module. Holmes provides a series of prompts for considering audience, purpose, genre, and context as keywords to help you think about how to shape your own argument. She also elaborates on how to apply insights about genre and modality from this chapter to your own writing for various publics.
Why Does It Matter?
Writing is all around us, mediating interactions between individuals, communities, and publics in subtle and profound ways. It is crucial for effective civic participation to develop a flexible, effective set of writing skills and practices that will serve you in the ever-changing digital composing landscape.
Module Goal and Learning Outcomes
- Analyze and reflect on the rhetorical differences—both the constraints and possibilities—of different modes of communication
- Evaluate the purpose and strategies necessary for addressing a relevant target audience
- Compose a text strategically designed to address that target audience
