PB2B

Whether you are playing tennis or dancing or writing a paper there are specific moves that you need to do for each in order to succeed in them. In writing moves take on a role that consumes the paper as a whole, since the author is trying to get their point across. In specific I will focus on the tone of the authors as well as on the diction, word usage, and the audience that the authors used and had in mind. The two articles that will be analyzed are “Shitty First Drafts” and “How to Read Like a Writer.” Each of the articles are composed of multiple moves whether they are the tones, word usage, or diction; the two articles have faults, but nonetheless succeed in the end. 

Furthermore, the tone differs quite vastly from one another. The tone that emerged in “Shitty First Drafts”(SFD) was a playful comedic tone. The author Anne Lamott admitted in the article that she is not a perfect writer and that it takes her many times to try to perfect one of her pieces of writing. The terminology that points out to a joking tone are “First drafts are child’s drafts” and “Either type, or kill yourself.” The first quotes gives a sense of playfulness as the author knows it takes baby steps to create a great paper. Likewise, the second quote gives a tone of frustration, but fooling around as well because many authors want to be able to write non-stop without having to revise their paper or read over it. The tone worked for this paper because the overall message and title for the SFD was already starting off as a joking theme. However, the message got put through in the end the article. 

Moreover, in “How to Read Like a Writer” the author Mike Bunn used various forms of writing in order to secure a tone of support as well as an informative tone along with that. The tone that is evoked with the words “Considering, Questioning, and Deciding” help solidify the authors’s intentions of informing his audience in how to read like a writer. Along with that, the author used “You are already an author” and “Are you ready to start reading?” to evoke a sense of familiarity. The author uses this technique in order to become closer with his audience and make them feel that even though the process of reading like a writer is difficult, it can be done. Overall, the author did his best in order to inform the reader with many techniques in order to find why a writer wrote something and gave advice on how people should be able to find little methods in which people write their pieces. 

Similar to the tone the two authors used distinct words and diction in order to get their point across. Anne Lamott as mentioned above took a comedic turn in her writing and the tittle itself gives a sense of fun and reliability. The writer also used terminology that surpassed the playfulness of the tone as she mentioned “All good writing begins with terrible first efforts” which gives a feeling that she is joking around in her article, but her main focus is centered on the idea of teaching people. As she indicates “Writing is not rapturous” her shift focuses on the aspect that it takes time to perfect a piece and that this will not always be achieved on the first try. Her diction is thus switching from an informal manner to a helpful manner which helps to make her paper understandable and relatable to many people. Mike Bunn best usage in the piece was his use of repetition among the paragraph that he used to describe what were the different aspects of the piece of writing. By using this method the author is able to explain each intricate step in which a person can analyze a small piece of writing. Also this helped so that the reader would not be overwhelmed with information and would be able to solely focus on that main paragraph. Mike Bunn’s method and reuse of the same paragraph for the his explanation in the end helped me greatly understand what he meant about reading like a writer. The two authors greatly used their methods in order to help push through their ideas which in the end worked best for them. 

Lastly, the audience that was intended for both of them was I believe the same. Since the two are both articles at different lengths, they seem as if they are intended to be for college writers who want to better their writing techniques. The two pieces greatly help as Lamott’s is intended to assist a writer in the idea that writing more than one rough draft is better. While Bunn’s article is intended to help a student analyze a piece of writing as a formula of some sort instead of a stream of letters. The two pieces in the end shared similar moves in which they both attracted the audience by using different moves to attract them. 

PB2A - From Trainspotting to SCIgen

Scholarly journals or academic journals tend to be dense and complex in nature. These journals are usually read or reviewed by people in their field and changed as new ideas begin to formulate, in order to make the piece better. Furthermore, the scholarly journal that I chose to review had to do with the Scottish movie Trainspotting. The scholarly source was written by Bert Cardullo who not only analyzed the film Trainspotting but also analyzed the book that happened to be named the same. In his journal he also analyzed similar films that had similar contexts and ideas to Trainspotting. Likewise, SCIgen also has a similar academic format as the scholarly source, overall the conventions and the features that each one has is slightly different from one another, but for the most part the two have similar features.      

Furthermore, the genre generator of SCIgen is complex in nature as it involves many features. First and foremost the jargon that was present in the genre generator was academic and scholarly even though some of the sentences structures were oddly written. The sentences sometimes felt as if they were in a wrong order and did not flow. Also another aspect of this was the format of the piece as it was structured with an abstract of the whole piece which gave a description of the entire work. Each SCIgen generator involved some sort of intro part where there would be a mention of a hypothesis and past methods that the work had been tested. Followed by that there would be a research and graph section that had diagrams and captions that would describe the results of the test. After the research section there would often be a section that would explain the conclusion that the researcher found from the research that had been conducted. Lastly what would be involved in the generator would be a works cited section where all the information the researcher used to prove his point would be acknowledged. The feature or conventions that make up the SCIgen generator are similar to that of a scholarly article as there are only a few features that differ between the two. 

Moreover, the scholarly journal that was researched was a journal regarding the movie Trainspotting and how well the characters and plot were portrayed in the film to the book. The format of the article was a little bit of an intro to the country that it was filmed in which was Scotland. Then the overall plot of the film was analyzed as well as the music components that were used in the film. The next convention of the piece was the analyzation of the different camera angles that the director used in order to convey a man that was on heroin. After primarily examining a few features of the film Cardullo begins disassembling the novel and breaking up the different parts of the novel and comparing the structure of the movie and the novel. As Cardullo mentions the “coming-of-age story” which he identifies as Trainspotting, he reveals certain quotes that were prominent in the novel and how they were adapted in the film. After this he begins to break down each character and analyze all of their qualities in both the film and novel. He seems to enjoy all of the characters in the film other than Renton who he seems to think could have been played by a better person. The last component that Cardullo used was the works cited page in order to address all of the information that he used in his piece. Lastly, the main difference that seemed to be predominant between SCIgen and Cardullo’s piece has to be the difference in topics as the topics are fairly different, however the structures of the two seemed to follow a similar structure of analyzation and eventually to a works cited portion.

Works Cited

Cardullo, Bert. "Fiction Into Film, Or Bringing Welsh To A Boyle." Literature Film Quarterly 25.3(1997): 158. Academic Search        

           Complete. Web. 18 Apr. 2015.

PB1B

Conventions are fundamentals to defining a genre as they are the different aspects of a genre. Essentially anything can be its own genre as long as it is made up of conventions and differs from other genres. Thus I will examine a few genre generators and analyze the components that make up each one. The first genre generator that I was set to analyze was SCIgen genre generator. Probably the most complex genre generator as it involved many graphs, references, and used a heavy use of jargon. The program itself is not that complex as you only have to insert an author or authors names. The excerpt that is generated seems to be for a college level reader or for a professor in college since the piece is written as if it was a lab report. The structure of the generated piece is complex as it begins with an abstract which explains what was done in the experiment. Another convention is the table of contents which consists of both textual evidence to support the authors experiment as well as the theory that the author is trying to prove. The graphs are another convention for the generator as there are multiple graphs explaining the authors point and supporting their theory. In order to solidify the piece some of the excerpts include a related works section with acknowledges people who also worked on a similar project. Each generated piece from SCIgen also has a reference section which is pretty much a works cited page that cites all of the authors used in the piece of writing. The SCIgen genre generator is the most complex as it is composed of may parts.

The comic strips was made up of a few conventions as it was much simpler than the SCIgen generation. The comic strips consists of randomly occurring comics of Simon and Finlay who are the two characters in the comic strip. The audience for the comic strips is most likely for high schoolers or young adults. The reason for this is that there is profanity as well as blood that is displayed in some images. Since this is done at random many of the images do not correlate and are out of place. The first comic scene usually is a pacifist one where one of the characters asks the other a question. The following comic tends to be more violent and absurd as well as the question is never answered. The last comic scene derives even more as it does not relate to the second comic scene. However, sometimes the first and third comic scene correlate in some way, but not entirely. The Pandyland by far is the most absurd genre generator, but also is not the least complex.

The last genre generator that I inspected was the meme generator. This genre had the simplest design as it involved a picture followed by words that anyone can type in. The intended audience for this is young adults and adults since some the references are complex. Many of the pictures that could be used for memes involved popular movies and popular television shows. The pictures tend to show an emotion that is similar to what the caption is stating. Memes are mainly used in pop culture to bring laughter to people and many are posted in social media sites such as reddit, tumblr, and twitter. Memes are simple but a genre of their own because they utilize popular images with comedic/sarcastic words usage. 

Lastly, I found my own genre generator at springholle.net and I went under the random  chosen random-generator. The conventions of this were fairly simple since all of the random-generators included words. The difference of these are that some randomly chosen generators  only had names while others had scenarios that could happen. Each was unique within themselves because all of the generators were random. There are almost unlimited genres that can be analyzed, and many have differences and similarities between the conventions that make them up.

Disney vs. Dark Romances

What is a romance novel? Does it regard a man falling in love with a woman, do they live happily ever after, is it always this simple. Not necessarily, one of the greatest books I ever read was Wuthering Heights which is considered to be in the romantic genre but it does not abide by many standards that the original romantic genre is composed of.  The traditional romantic genre mainly involves a man and a woman who are separated by some sort of force before they are to be married. This has some correlation to the Disney movie princesses as they are sometimes obstructed by a witch to get to their prince. After the prince defeats the witch the two live as a happy couple. What does not make sense is that the prince and princess have a few actions of being together before they get married? This is best exemplified in movies such as Cinderella, Snow White, The Little Mermaid, and Sleeping Beauty. Contrary to that, the genre that evolves from novels like Wuthering Heights are dark romances. Dark romances are conceptualized with death and can have happy endings except they are not the basic happily ever after as in most romance novels. Rather dark romances can have ties to Shakespeare such as in Romeo and Juliet, though they were both in love they both did end up dying in the end. This helps explain the fact that living happily ever after in a castle is not always the case in many lives. In many lives death will occur, but the way you remember your lover is what matters. This can be seen in Wuthering Heights when Elizabeth dies and Heathcliff is torn to pieces as he cannot be with his beloved. According to this book the conventions of a dark romance would consists a strong female character who has to make a decision between wealth or a man that she loves. In the book Catherine’s decision was between Edgar Linton who was a rich neighbor that she had or Heathcliff, her adopted brother who was rescued by her dad. Furthermore, as this romance is dark a person dies has to die and I mentioned before this is Catherine. Also the love that developed between Heathcliff and Catherine can be seen as dark since they are step siblings. The overbearing protagonist in the book was Heathcliff who was not a kind person, but rather a mean person who would hurt anyone in this way to get closer to Catherine. This evokes another convention in this genre as the main character is not necessarily a prince but rather a person taken over by love for another. Another convention would be that the love between the two people is unorthodox such as a possible connection between a vampire and a human. The endings of dark romances can be happy or a saddening one. For one the novel  Wuthering Heights ending was a little bit of both since it involved a depressed Heathcliff who acquired a bunch of land by negative means. However, the ending also involved positivity as his lover’s daughter and his adopted son were eventually going to get married because their love was growing. The romance genre is complex as it involves conventions from Disney animated love stories, while also containing darker elements such as in Wuthering Heights.