The author of “You Can Learn to Write in General” is Elizabeth Wardle. She is Howe Professor and Director of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami of Ohio. She has a PhD in Rhetoric & Professional Communication. I think that the primary audience for this text is her students. Primarily college students. The text says that genre is what you are writing for or about. This is different from some of the other texts that we have read because other texts have stated that a text gets put into a category based on what the text is about. Although this is similar to Wardle’s claim it is not the same. Wardle says that you can’t just go and write something without a genre or a category in mind. What you are writing about must be determined beforehand. This text is written to show the reader that writing can be very challenging sometimes and that they shouldn’t stress out when writing for a new audience or writing about a new topic.
The next text is “Genre as a Social Action.” It was written by Carolyn R. Miller. She was a Professor of Rhetoric and Technical Communication at North Carolina State. Unlike the first text, this is much more dense and a bit harder to read, so I would guess that this was written for other professors or scholars in a similar field. This text says that genre is what classifies discourses into a certain class. Miller says that “genre is a rhetorical means for mediating private intentions and social exigence.” It helps to connect things. This seems to agree with some of the previous texts that we read. From what we have learn, rhetoric can be used to try and persuade the reader. If a person were to read something with a certain genre, they might be persuaded to connect their private thought with public actions or ideas. I think that the texts primary purpose was to educate the reader.
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