Miller; Wardle

Wardle

The author of this piece is Elizabeth Wardle. Wardle is a professor and director of the Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University, which makes her very qualified to write about the factors of good and bad writing. The primary audience for this text is students. I can tell that the primary audience is students because it written in a way that is easy for me to understand, and I am a student with a brief understanding of the topic. I could not pick out one explicit definition of “genre”, but at the beginning of page thirty one she talks about “learning to write in different situations” and I think she is talking about genre in this instance. She writes that whatever an author is writing is impacted and molded by the situation that they are writing in, and the life experiences that the author has been through. I think that Wardle is implying that this is how we get different types of genre. This ties into the main argument of the text that the expectation that is set for authors can never be met, because the same expectations are set for multiple people although they all write in different “situations”. This argument differs from past arguments we have analysed because it considers and authors individual experiences. The primary purpose of this text is to get this message of “situations” across to the audience.

Miller

The author of this piece is Carolyn Miller, a rhetorician who wrote in the “Quarterly Journal of Speech”. The primary audience of this text is anybody who is interested in topics of literature and speech because it is written in a journal that is written and published quarterly. Miller defines “genre” in terms of rhetoric as “a particular type of discourse classification” that is “based in rhetorical practice”. I think that Miller is saying something similar to Wardle in this instance, and there ideas on “genre” are very similar. I think that the primary rhetorical purpose of this text is to get Miller’s idea and argument of how “genre” should be considered across to the audience and out into the world.