In class I’m getting much more acquainted with the idea of a genre. Throughout my prior learning experiences, I had only seen the word genre in the context of different kinds of books, whether they be dramas, romantic, comedy, etc. I now know that genres range across a wide variety, and essentially infinite variety of categories. They can be small, and can be contained in as many other genres as I could think of.
Person 3 mentioned in Journal 1.2 that the genres they are most familiar with are novels, newspaper articles, and adventure. This was interesting to me because I previously would have known that adventure was a genre, however I would not have known to categorize newspaper articles or novels as genres.
I pictured genres being more specific than a novel or an article, however it is now clear that these broader categories also have conventions and styles that are specific to just them. To me, if I’m testing if something is a genre, I picture reading it while unaware of the genre, and seeing if there are enough conventions that I could classify it under a category. This category would be what I would consider it’s genre, or one of its genres.
It is also important to keep in mind that one piece of writing can have as many genres as you can think of for it. I would not have thought this before; I probably would have just immediately tried to categorize writing into a generic genre, like comedy or drama. However, that would be extremely limiting to less generic genres, such as emails, texts, columns, etc.
When first reading something and deciphering it, I think it is more useful to use first order thinking, just as you should when you are initially trying to write something. If you read something and process it initially with second order thinking, your thoughts will be constricted and it will be more difficult to decide what genre the piece is. Overall, genres are much more outside-the-box than I originally thought, which is why I think first order thinking is useful.
Your paper stands out from the other PBs I have read because it seems like you are arguing that different scholarly articles have different conventions compared to the idea that scholarly articles pretty much all follow the same conventions regardless of their differences. You mentioned why other fields may not value all the information given in a psychological scholarly article, I like this point because it is like what we were doing in class today about what information matters depending on the field. I guess my question would be is if another field wrote this piece would it still be considered scholarly if it does not follow the same conventions of a research paper?
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