Chapter 2: Decoding Genre
Writing Beliefs
Before you can learn to write in a new context, it’s helpful to explore how you got to this point. Every one of us arrives at university with our own beliefs and assumptions about writing. Sometimes, these beliefs are helpful. Sometimes, however, our beliefs can hold us back. By talking about our reading and writing beliefs and figuring out where they came from, we can challenge unhelpful beliefs and be more successful.
Thinking about your writing beliefs is also a great way to celebrate the strengths you already have. For example, if you’ve learned Traditional Stories from Elders in your community, you already know a story can be used as a powerful teaching tool when tailored to the right audience at the right time. Your ability to write poetry will give you a special facility and flexibility with language. If you can shift between multiple languages, you can read and understand even more of the available research on a topic. Our goal is not to erase what’s unique about your writing voice to make it “appropriate” for an academic writing genre, but to build on your existing skills so that you can be successful in university and beyond.
Academic writing is a genre that we must learn, but we can bring our previous experience with us to the table.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
- What past writing experience do you bring to this new genre that you can draw from? This does not have to be scholarly or scientific.
- How do you think university writing in your discipline might be different than what was expected of you in high school?
- Do you have a writing process? What does it feel like?
Student Narrative
My belief is that I have the potential to be a good writer, although I have some minor obstacles I am still actively trying to overcome. Dyslexia has been a part of my life for some time, first introducing itself around the age of 15. While writing, I would leave out half the letters even though I knew how to spell the word. I would make silly grammatical errors, as they would simply pass by me, and repeated words would go unnoticed. I write this in past tense despite the fact that I still do face these challenges. Eventually, dyslexia presented itself while I spoke. Occasionally, my words would come out in a jumbled order, causing me to halt in my conversation, wondering what just happened.
However, despite these obstacles, I managed to make it to university. I try my best to challenge myself when writing regardless of the grammatical errors I may make, since ultimately I can fix my errors when proofreading my work, so they can not actually limit my ability to write.
Adaptations
Material in this section has been adapted from Looking Back and What Do Experts Say about Reading and Writing in Business Writing For Everyone by Arley Cruthers, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Media Attributions
- johnny_automatic_path_to_star © OpenClipArt is licensed under a Public Domain license
- Think © Kirby Wu is licensed under a CC BY (Attribution) license
