PB1B: Inspecting Genre Generators

            The “genre generator” websites work by applying a fixed pattern of conventions to each piece no matter what you plug into them. Each genre has a very specific set of conventions that make it up. A genre can be defined by its conventions so it is important to be able to identify them in a piece of writing.

            In the SCIgen generator, it creates a computer science-related research paper when you enter one to five authors at random. Each and every research paper may be different in topic, but they all consist of very similar conventions. Each paper starts off with the title of the paper in big letters and underneath it is the authors that you have entered in. The first part of the paper is the “Abstract”, which gives a brief introduction and their goal of the experiment. The next convention is the table of contents, which includes six parts with short paragraphs expanding on it. The six parts include the introduction, related work, methodology, implementation, evaluation, and conclusion. All of these are typical of a research experiment so it not surprising to find them as conventions of this research paper. Also, at the end is a list of references, citing all the sources used to write this paper. The references are numbered and in MLA format. In addition to the paragraphs describing the experiment, there are also graphs and figures to further describe the experiment by displaying the data.

            The next generator is a comic strip generator, creating various comic strips. There is a certain set of pictures displaying one scene and the generator will randomly order three of them into a comic strip even if they don’t make sense. Each picture displays a situation between the two characters, Simon and Finlay, where some kind of action or conversation is occurring. The speech bubbles coming out of each of the characters mouth display conversation between them. All of the comics have a purplish blue background with a grey ground. The dialogue between them is quite vulgar and harsh with a lot of profanity said. The tone of these comic strips is intended to be funny because of the things they say and the randomness of the scenes. The randomness of the comic is the biggest convention to this comic strip generator.

            The meme generator allows you to create your own meme by picking one of the general meme pictures and writing your own captions to it. A meme is usually a funny picture that is very popular among internet users and universally known by them. The biggest convention of a meme is the image being used. This image is usually a person from pop culture with a reaction that is related to the caption. Some examples of the characters used in memes are Willy Wonka, Bad Luck Brian, and the Forever Alone potato. The captions of these memes are usually on the top or bottom (sometimes both) of these pictures. These captions are usually very funny and witty while expressing a relatable thought or a realization.

            After using these websites, it can really help you to understand genre because the generators all have a specific formula they follow to create a certain type of genre. The generators take all the conventions of a certain genre to create an example of it. When you play around with these websites and create a couple pieces, you will start seeing the patterns the generators use. For example, in the computer science research paper, all of them have an abstract, table of contents, and references. These are some of the conventions that make up this genre of research papers. All of these generators show the similarities in a certain type of genre, distinguishing them from other genres.

PB1A

A textual genre that I am very familiar with is a tweet especially since I am on Twitter on a daily basis. I go on Twitter and read tweets pretty often everyday. Occasionally, I would tweet out my own or retweet other people’s tweets so I am fairly familiar with its rhetorical features and conventions. Twitter is one of the biggest social media sites in connecting people with each other from all around the world. It is popular for features that are unique to only Twitter unlike other social media sites such as Facebook.

Twitter includes many rhetorical features such as audience, purpose, and context. The audience of a tweet is usually a person’s followers. This can include friends and acquaintances from real life or over the internet. Tweets can be seen by anyone or a person can set their profile to private so that only people following can see the tweets. The purpose of a tweet is to spread and share information to their audience. This can include inner thoughts, special events, and promotions. The context of a tweet can be anything related to someone’s personal life or business-related. For personal use, people usually tweet about things going on in their life and it is very spontaneous. For businesses, tweets are probably planned and well-thought out for promoting certain products or deals. Generally, twitter has a very casual style and tone. Many tweets are formatted in ways very similar to the way people usually text.  Tweets usually consist of slang, abbreviations, and emojis, all of which are used when texting. The style of a tweet depends entirely on the person tweeting. Some people use correct grammar and punctuation when others will misspell and be grammatically incorrect. Similarly, the tone will be also based on the person, depending on the mood they are currently in. Whether a person is sad or happy, a person can convey this either explicitly stating it or they can implicitly imply it by tweeting out, for example, sad song lyrics. Some conventions of a tweet are the username, timestamps, trending topics, hash tags, favorites and retweets. The username is also part of the url to your twitter page followed by “twitter.com/”. Each tweet has a timestamp on it indicating how many minutes or hours ago you posted. A unique feature of Twitter is the ability to favorite and retweet a tweet. When you favorite a tweet, it just goes into your “Favorites” tab while retweeting posts someone else’s tweet on your twitter profile. Another convention of Twitter is your homepage, the timeline of all the tweets from everyone you follow. Your timeline is constantly updated as people are tweeting. New tweets will pop up and there is an endless scroll that allows you to see past tweets continuously. A tweet is a tweet for the fact that it is a short and quick message. A tweet can consist of at most 140 characters, which can really restrict all the things you want to say at once. However, you can also send out as many tweets as you want. A tweet allows people to connect over the internet through short messages.

About Me

My name is Sandy Hoang and I’m a first year economics and accounting major. I am from Rosemead, a small city in LA County. I am part Chinese and part Vietnamese.  I can speak the languages Cantonese and a little bit of Mandarin, but not Vietnamese at all. My parents both know Vietnamese, but never spoke it with me. My mom was pregnant with me when she was still in China after marrying my dad. Then one month later, my dad sponsored her to immigrant over to the United States and they met up in New York. My dad had already come over to the US since he was able to do so legally, but not my mom. My parents stayed there for a couple of months and were debating on whether to stay in New York or move to California, where most of my mom’s relatives were. They ended up choosing California because they thought it would be a better place to live and a couple months after that I was born. My mom ended up giving birth to me exactly on Thanksgiving after dinner. From then on, I grew on in Rosemead and finally graduated from San Gabriel High School. In high school, I was on the swim team for all four years. Before joining, I did not know how to swim at all, but I really wanted to learn so they taught me. It was very difficult learning all the four strokes and diving, but I pushed through and put all my effort into it. Through a lot of hard work and time, I ended up swimming varsity my junior and senior year. My best stroke was breaststroke and a little of freestyle. I really loved swimming and being in the water all the time. It has really motivated me both physically and mentally in life.