two genres comparison

For your first paper assignment, you will be analyzing two genres of your choice and comparing them in terms of audience, purpose, and composition.

You will remember from class that, if you look at it the right way, pretty much anything can be a text and thus can be analyzed. For this essay, I would like you to choose two—any two, not necessarily “academic”—genres, find examples of each, analyze them, and compare your findings. You should choose two genres that “speak to each other” in some way. For example, you could analyze two types of social media communication (the tweet vs. the Instagram pic) or a physical book vs. a book read via a tablet or reader.

I want you to feel free to think outside the box here. You can analyze two genres of video games (FPS vs. RPG), two types of cartoons (American animation vs. anime), two different types of news sources (newspaper vs. online news), and so forth. You can “genre-fy” just about anything and you can thus analyze anything in terms of its generic conventions.

In addition to conducting a discussion of your chosen genres (and at least one example of each), you will have two secondary sources for this paper. Ideally, they will be scholarly articles about your two genres. (Yes, there are scholarly articles about things like video games and Twitter.)

You don’t have to set your paper up in a particular way but here’s one possible way to go about it: intro (define each genre and explain why you are comparing the two); description of each genre in terms of what it “looks like,” its purpose and intended audience, providing and discussing examples of each; a discussion of how the two genres “interact” (what they have in common in terms of composition, purpose, and audience, and how they differ); some “takeaways” about the two genres in terms of their potential for future use.

Your paper will be in the MLA format and, accordingly, will be double-spaced, will contain a separate Works Cited page, and will not contain a cover page.

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