English 102: Multi-Genre Paper

A: The following is a brief, and necessarily incomplete, list of genres that you might try using in your responses. You should always feel free to try things not listed here.

• letter
• email
• advertisement
• magazine article
• want ad
• news report
• poem
• dialogue
• speech
• play
• summary
• talk show
• class syllabus
• analysis
• sitcom
• movie review
• journal entry
• book cover
• CD liner notes
• fashion magazine article
• instruction manual
• teacher's paper comments
• advice column
• cartoon
• interview
• quiz
• menu
• recipe
• encyclopedia entry
• play-by-play
• essay
• ransom note
• radio broadcast
• tabloid article
• greeting card
• obituary
• eulogy
• thank you note
• grocery list
• map
• book jacket
• wanted poster
• diary entry
• post card
• eyewitness account
• lab analysis
• collage
• graph or chart
• cereal box
• instruction manual

A: The reasons are threefold. First, the multi-genre paper allows a writer to practice more than one kind of writing, and requires the writer to consider how specific forms of writing accomplish different ends. This ability to identify type of writing with its purpose or rhetorical function is a basic tenet of literary study. Second, the multi-genre paper provides practice with the linking of critical thinking to creative expression. Finally, a well-constructed multi-genre paper can make the same points, criticisms, and arguments that a traditional analysis makes; it is simply in a different--neither better nor worse--format.

A: Here are some suggestions that might help you see some elements from a new perspective:

• Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
• Write diary entries for the Hatter, or the Red Knight, or the Queen of Hearts, that describe their encounters with Alice.
• Highlight a number of interesting words the narrator uses in the story that you find significant, and use those words in a free-verse poem that captures an important idea in the novel(s)
• Write an newspaper account of the queen's croquet game.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
• Write an internal monologue for one of the characters in the story.
• Write a diary entry for Aunt Em as she waits for Dorothy's return
• Write a recipe for the successful escape from Oz
• Write an advertisement whose intent is to get more people to move to Emerald City
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
• Write a description of how the chocolate factory might look if Willy Wonka was Wendy Wonka
• Look at one specific scene, and write the thoughts of the character as the events unfold (e.g. Augustus's thoughts as he falls in the Chocolate River)
• Write a parody of the book's premise using a contemporary factory in place of the chocolate factory (e.g. Billy and the Sierra Nevada Beer Factory)
• Put Veruca Salt in a room with Alice and Dorothy from the prior books and see what happens
• Any story/poem/play:
• Write the obituary of a central character. The manner and time of death can be made up for you for any character still alive during the scope of the literary piece. Explore what about the character might be remembered after his or her death.
• Assume that you're an archeologist a couple thousand years in the future, and that you've uncovered the literary piece. What might an archeologist see in the literature? What might it tell the archeologist about the culture that produced the literature?
• Rewrite what you think is an important scene, event, etc. in the literary piece, using a different genre (e.g. you might rewrite a narrative in poetic form, or as a play scene) to showcase that important idea.
• Write a narrative of your own voice piecing together what you thought as you read the literary piece.
• Rewrite all or part of the literary piece, changing some aspect of the piece that you find important, in order to explore the significance of that element. For instance, you might change the gender of a character, or an aspect of the setting (change the location, or the time period), and see what effect that change has on the literature.