Blog 4 - Horsen' around - Genre

War Horse

'Genre is when texts or cultural products, such as music, writing, drama, art are grouped into classes based on similarities and shared conventions' ( Van Luyn, 2013).

Within the Pharlap community, there is no given genre that is followed. Most post are made in a casual style that follow a similar writing style to that that you would find in a everyday text to your friend.

'Writing, essentially, that is characterised by the following qualities: (1) clarity; (2) coherence;

(3) logical organisation; (4) accuracy and correctness; (5) sufficiency; and (6) style' (DiYanni, 2005)

While this is explained as the correct style of good essay writing by DiYanni, not often do we come across this kind of genre within a post on Pharlap, unless of course someone has posted a link to an academic source, such as a journal article etc. However most post do in some way follow these 6 steps, although not in a way that would be deemed as academic, YOLO, LOL, IMHO, and LMFAO are a common occurrence, informal language is what is regularly seen posted all over the wall of the Pharlap page.

McNeill states that, 'Dairies both online and off are rife with presupposing expressions... These expressions, signalling information that the writer assumes the addresses shares, provide key sign posts for interpreting common ground and pinpointing audience design'(McNeill, n.d) From the posts shared on Pharlaps page, it is fair to say that these posts have indeed taken on these expressions that McNeill has noted, these expressions such as 'look what happened today' or 'today I' enables the members of the group connect and relate to each post and the member responsible for the post.  

References 

Di Yanni, R. (2005). Introduction: Reading and writing essays, in Twenty-five great essays (p.15). New York, New York: Penguin Academics.

McNeill, L. (u.d). Diary A Genre Moves from Page to Screen .Language and New Media: Linguistic, Cultural and Technological Evolutions (p. 320). Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press Inc.

Van Luyn, A. (2013, September 2). Lecture 6: Genre. Townsville, Queensland, Australia.

YOLO (2013) Youtube. Retrieved September 10, 2013 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKqDStuh4fM

Image Reference 

Image 1: War Horse (2011) Retrieved from: http://www.aletmanski.com/al-etmanski/2011/11/war-horse-they-shot-horses-too.html