kahwriting

I have completed Romano’s Blending Genre, Altering Style and in his last few chapters Romano had a lot to share. He spoke about very effective styles of writing, but the first tip he mentioned was that aside from emotion, add facts to writing. People want to gain information – this is why they read! So although emotional pieces can be very moving, adding information will give a reader more insight to what the experience described in your piece entails. Another effective type of writing can be done by writing from a different point of view, or perspective. For example, writing about the young college woman that I am may be interesting, but by taking on a completely different role (for example, an eighth grade boy) will not only allow my readers some variation, but will also open my eyes to learning how other people think, act, learn, play, etc.

Romano then discusses three types of writing: Poetic, Transactional, and Expressive. With poetic writing, pieces are all about creativity and emotion. They may have a story line, but they have a lot to do with the way a person feels. Transactional writing is a way to make a person behave a certain way. Romano’s examples include writing a formal peace treaty, or scribbling notes with “reminders” on them. These are for people to see and to follow. There is also expressive writing, which he claims to be the least often used. Expressive writing is personal, unpressured and relaxed. It is also very rough pieces of work. There are spelling errors, repeated words and phrases, and maybe only partial thoughts. A good way to get students writing expressively is to do journal writing. This way a student writes whatever he or she feels and just gets ideas on the paper. When working on full-length drafts of writing, a student could come back to this stream of thoughts, polish it, and use it. This is a technique used in many of my writing classes once in a while to get our brain moving. I am excited to share it with my students one day.

Another style of writing introduced was the idea of repetition. By using the movie example Mr. Holland’s Opus, Romano explained the understanding of repetition. To make multi-genre (or any genre) pieces really connect, a writer may use one common connection in all of his pieces. In Mr. Holland’s Opus that piece was a compass. The compass was a symbol of the growth of Mr. Holland as a music teacher, and it appeared several times throughout the movie. I think that using certain expressions or images in multi-genre writing would be a vivid way for other readers to understand different messages being conveyed.

Romano ended with evaluation and grading policies. This seems as though it would be the hardest part of teaching students about multi-genre writing. How do you evaluate someone’s creativity? How do you evaluate all of the hard work a student has put in to a project that has not quite come out the way the project was intended? Romano seems to hint that each teacher needs to find their own style. Which parts of writing are important to them? Which parts of the assignment were the students supposed to learn from? And, what do the writers/students themselves think about their own work? I am still concerned about the evaluation process. I think that it is something that, as a teacher, I will have to play around with from project to project. I am interested in what my students have to say about each of their writing pieces, and I am interested in what they will have learned in the process of a project such as multi-genre writing.

In continuing to read Tom Romano’s Blending Genre, Altering Style, I am continuing to learn about student writing and ideas for my future students.

Recently I have read Romano’s chapters on writing dialog. He spoke quite a bit about “dialog tags”. He explained that in student writing, when a dialog between two characters has been written, it may be challenging to understand who has said what it if is not labeled on each line. Unfortunately, if in writing dialog, the writer were to include “he said” “she said” after every single spoken phrase, this would take away from the dialog as well. Rather than using “said” after every line, Romano goes further to explain how ridiculous writing can get if another phrase was used to signify who is speaking.
This example was on page 62:

“What happened,” I asked, questioningly.
“I don’t know,” Scott announced, puzzled.
“Good Lord!” I exclaimed excitedly, “I didn’t know you guys were doing that! Was it in your script?” I continued frantically…..

…You get the picture. I remember doing this when I was first learning to add variety and detail to my dialog. It’s a hard idea to master – no one wants to sound boring, but no one wants to sound silly either.

Romano continued to discuss mulitgenre pieces. Although this is what we discussed in writing class last time, I was able to get an even better understanding of how I should present this project to students, and what they might write about. I thought the mulitgenre collection in the book about “multiculturalism” was very moving. It showed me that my students may be interested in writing about something bigger than their job or their baseball team.

I was also inspired by the different types of genre examples, especially the chapter on writing poetry. There are many types of poems – to name a few: prose, haiku, photograph poem, and poems for two voices. I was intrigued by the different types and the way a message is conveyed by each. For example, the photograph poem was a great way to incorporate a visual effect. Some readers cannot visualize what is happening, but by adding a photograph and writing a poem from that scene, a reader is able to learn much about what is happening inside the life of that photograph. Another type of poem I really enjoyed was the poem with two voices. In this poem, two voices are speaking but from different points of view. In my mulitgenre project that I am creating for my final project, I am already planning to use this style for the poetry requirement I have established. I am looking forward to seeing how it turns out. Romano’s ideas on mulitgenre work has inspired me.

In Tom Romano’s book Blending Genre, Altering Style Writing Multigenre Papers, Romano talks about just that. He begins by explaining why teachers love multigenre papers. Aside from helping students to learn from a new way of writing, multigenre works enable students to explore AND give teachers a refreshing way to look at student writing. Rather than typical writing, or as he states “paradigmatic” writing, Romano explains how multigenre writing can be different for students. For example, if a student writes a narrative there is no thesis, no pro-con arguments, and no points articulated.

To get into multigenre writing, students should explore topics that they are interested. Students should use their “creative, imaginative, and intellectual.” Romano says that students should choose a topic, write a rationale for the topic, and suggest the topic in small groups. As a teacher, suggesting different books relating to the student’s genre would be a way to encourage and help them with the project. As a student who has not been out of high school for very long, having the freedom to do such a thing was usually somewhat of a shock. Generally topics were given, perhaps with some variety. I find this to be an exciting method of teaching and learning.

Romano does mention some fears of students writing multigenre papers. He mentions that some students just do not understand. There are some students who put together their work very well, creatively and neatly. Some students, however, do not understand the art of multigenre writing and end up with messy projects. Some students throw out many different topics into their multigenre writing which also creates an unorganized or unfocused paper. In order to fix this, Romano suggests writing an opener for the paper. In doing this, the student writes a brief few paragraphs explaining what their topic is and why they have chosen it, or what it means to them. By doing so, the student is briefing her reader with some background that may help the reader understand the student’s work easier. Romano does state that some multigenre works do need introductions, while others do not. After looking at a few examples in Blending Genre, Altering Style I found that these introductions are a nice piece of the project to get a grip on what the project is all about. I think that by adding this piece, it sort of ties the project together and think that a conclusion could be nice as well. This way, the student can wrap up her ideas at the end, say any last words, and reflect on the project that she has just finished.