Multigenre Writing

Even though I found all of the readings this week interesting, I am going to focus my reflection for this week on Romano’s work, mainly because before reading Romano’s book, I had never heard of a “multigenre paper.” To be honest, I was initially intimidated by the idea of a multigenre paper. It seemed to have absolutely no structure at all: just random snippets of writing jumbled together. However, after reading a few examples from Romano’s book, specifically the first full example he shared titled “Cosmetic Clips,” I became intrigued with the idea. The idea of writing many short pieces in different genres makes composing a while story seem easy. I think that this stems from the fact that in multigenre writing, a lot of the content of the story comes from the reader. The writer provides a sort of path for the reader to follow, but the reader has to read between the pieces to see what is happening and truly understand the story. Combining so many different pieces of writing together makes the story seem real, like the reader is going through someone else’s scrapbook or sifting through a collection of miscellaneous papers that a person has collected about their life. I especially like this idea because it not only gives the writer a chance to experiment, but the reader can also experiment with meaning. The spaces left between pieces give the reader room to invent his own stories or scenarios and make his own personal meaning out of the writing.  

 

I think that it would be really fun to have my students experiment with multigenre writing in my classroom.  It is a really good way for young writers to not only experiment with many different genres, but because each piece is quite short, it gives them an opportunity to produce really polished writing with less of a chance of getting them bored from working on the same piece for too long. Being able to experiment with many different genres of writing will also keep students motivated to keep working on their papers. In addition, it would be fun to see how many different genres students could come up with, which could also help to motivate students. 

 

Despite this, I don’t necessarily agree with using a multigenre format for a research paper. I know that Romano had addressed this in the book by talking about the guilt he felt in not having students write essays, reports, and term papers. He went on to say that multigenre writing can enhance expository writing. But students still need to be explicitly taught how to write a formal research paper, or how to format an essay. Simply saying that multigenre writing will enhance students’ other writing skills does not detract from the fact that students need to be taught these constructions. Colleges will expect that students know how to write an essay or research paper; all of students’ work cannot be turned into a multigenre writing project. In addition to this, I felt that the examples that Romano included in the text that were research based felt almost heavy and clumsy. Putting a lot of research-based facts into the multigenre piece detracted a lot from the writing and the piece as a whole and I found myself not as engaged with those pieces than the ones that were based purely on personal experiences of the writer. So, I think that I would only teach multigenre writing to my students as a form of purely creative writing and self expression, not as format for a research paper.

Here's my resource link for the week: http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~WAC/page.jsp?id=62&c_type=category&c_id=37
(My blog is not letting me set up a link to it, so you'll have to copy and paste. Sorry!)
It is a set of instructions and advice for conducting student-teacher conferences on writing. It deviates from Atwell's suggestions for conferences some -- specifically in the length of conferences and the frequency -- but I thought that it offered some good advice on what to do and think about before, during, and after conferences.