1st Wix Post

For whatever reason, I had never really thought about genre regarding writing. Especially not my own writing. I had always thought genre was another word for a static category of things that are very similar, which is slightly inaccurate. As mentioned in Navigating Genres, I had thought that genres were strict and required every person that wrote in them to fill in the blanks. However, genres are more like fluid formulas for solving particular problems. They adapt to fit your circumstance. For instance, when your teacher assigns you a paper, you are forced to write an answer that fits the prompt. How will you answer it? This is where genre comes in and provides guidelines for answering the prompt. These guidelines are helpful suggestions, not rigid absolutes. If genres were not fluid, then every student given a prompt would write the same thing. Genres are flexible and I can prove it. The last essay that I wrote was a research essay about my career goals. Our teacher suggested that we write about ourselves, but citations were also required. I felt that this suggestion was very strange, but I went with it. In the end, my paper was a well informed and insightful research essay about the different branches of the nursing career. It read like a strategy for the future, and it was unique. In fact, it was so unique that I felt like I was breaking every writing rule while writing it. I wrote a research essay in the first person, and it was one of the best research essays I have ever written.