Journal #4

The role of genre in creating a text according to our three texts on the topic is that when we know the genre for which we are creating a text for we know certain boundaries and elements that are expected of it. Similarly, when we read a text we are expecting for it to be fitting into these boundaries that genre supposedly sets for it. For example, when we read a blog we have expectations on the layout that it is supposed to take and for type of content it is sharing with us. The layout usually has a title, a column on the side with links to either separate pages of specific entries, the entries themselves are listed by most recently published with a title and date, and the entries are each give a personally, first person, insight into a question or situation.

Genre factors into many decisions that we make when we compose because it dictates the elements of our composition, the composition of a theater script is much different than the writing of a fantasy novel. Additionally, each different genre is composed for different purposes directed towards different audiences. The purpose of a theater script is vastly different than that of a fantasy novel. A script is made for the actors who will memorize and perform this story on stage for a different audience and it is made for the stage techs who will pay much closer attention to the actions of the story instead of the dialogue of the actors to bring the story to life for the audience in their theater. A fantasy novel has a layout very different from a script which breaks up lines and paragraphs in a much different way and a very different writing style from a script since the novel is trying to put the people reading it directly into this fantasy world instead of telling them how to create a believable fantasy world for the purposes of presenting to someone else.

Genre choices impact the circulation and distribution process of the material because different genres have different methods of distribution that are meant for them or work best for them. For example, the distributions of a television script and a tweet are vastly different as a tweet is something short and simple and made to be immediately shared to a large audience online while a television script is meant for a small, private audience and meant to only be shared between the people working on the set of the production.