Genre and Why It Isn't As Lame As We All Thought

Rigid genres with mandatory rules and regulations never did seem quite right, did they? Writing is supposed be effective in reaching the purposes of the writer. How was anyone ever expected to do that while being held down by boring straight-edge formulas? Genre is meant to mkae writing MORE effective, not less. That's why genre is more like sets of guidelines to help us. It molds itself to our specific situations, not the other way around. We use our rhetoric situation in order to find our purpose, audience, appeals, and so on. Genre guides us in the right direction based on the situation, and we take it our own way. Take my most recent genre, for example:

My most recent genre is this one, a new genre to me. I've never blogged before, especially not about my own writing. In order to figure out what to write, I went to explore the same entry written by other people in the class. I needed a feel for what I was writing. Next, I needed to find my audience. My audience was, yes, the teacher, but also my other classmates who are going to be doing the same thing I did when I needed to know exactly how I should be writing. I had to take into account also what my goal was. Telling a story? Not really. Persuading? Not so much. Relaying information? Bingo. My purpose was to explain my new definition of genre after the readings and then describe what it was like writing in this new genre. Is that all, though? No, I also wanted to maintain the attention of the audience; I had to make my entry interestingly different enough from the rest, but relaying the same information at the same time.