Mackenzie Casey Casey 1

Professor Gardiakos

ENC 1102

21 January 2020

Reading Response; ​The Craft of Research a​ nd “Navigating Genres”

When crafting your writing and pulling research from various sources, you want to

entertain your audience. This only comes with authors who are very passionate about their

writing and want it to succeed. These successful authors want to encourage their readers to

become engaged with their writing, and learn from what they’re providing them with. When

authors try to skim the surface with their writing, their readers lose interest and the purpose of

the paper you were attempting to write is irrelevant.

The Craft of Research​, gives us this idea of writing your paper and formulating your

research into a “conversation”. This allows the reader to play a part in your research. You are not

just spewing facts and telling them what you know but you’re involving them in the process of

understanding and learning what you have found. In the book they define exactly what an

effective writer would want a reader to get out of their paper, “Then we imagine a persona of our

on: writers committed to the value of research, interested in sharing how it works, talking at you

like a lecturer or ​down​ to you like a pendant, but ​with ​“you” we hoped you want to become.”

Realistically, reading through research and trying to explain to someone what you have spent

hours finding, is not always the most entertaining. However, putting your research into your

paper with a conversational style, is the best way to remove doubt about keeping your audience

entertained. In the past, I have had to decipher many articles and books in the shoes of the reader
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to learn something new, or answer a question. Some of the times, I would find myself

completing the reading and in the end having retained absolutely nothing, by that point I had just

wasted some valuable time that I could have been learning. However, I have noticed a definitive

change when I was given a reading that made me feel as though I was talking with the author.

The difference between these good writings is very obvious. The writing that I easily was

intrigued in, connected with real-life examples that I could relate back to my life and I felt like I

was personally being taught and not just having facts being thrown at me.

I feel as though we observe many problems in our world today, being that it is

ever-changing and there are always new things that come in and out of our lives that affect it for

the better and sometimes worse. One really prominent example that I feel I can personally be

very passionate about is social media. Social media, has affected our world so significantly in the

last couple of years, first with facebook, instagram, twitter, later evolving to snapchat, and so

much more that I couldn’t even list. Social media is one of the most amazing and rewarding

platforms, but also one of the most detrimental and degrading. Being in the generation that has

evolved with social media through most of my life, I have seen how people have progressively

become more and more addicted. Social media gives you the ability to become in touch with

people you haven't seen in years, opportunities to connect with new people, express your talents,

or even celebrate and show-off goals/milestones you have met in your life. However, with all of

these positive attributes, there is bound to be some negative. Social media, is also one of the

worst outlets we have allowed to infiltrate our lives, it has allowed us to become disconnected

from others and be glued to our phones when we don’t want to associate with others, it has
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allowed us to hide behind a screen and pretend that we are someone we are not, and it has

allowed us to feel some sort of empowerment that we can tear people down with ignorant

comments, this in turn leaving so many kids today with severe depressive issues and much more.

We use this form of reading and writing in our everyday lives, and no matter how we try to draw

attention to the severity of this problem, it doesn’t seem to become any better. I am very

passionate about this topic, because I myself am a product of this social media age and I see

these detrimental and amazing things filter in and out everyday. By getting my research and

passion across in a way that people would be engaged in would be extremely rewarding.

Also, to improve almost any writing, you need to have a good grasp of genres and the

differences. You need to understand a couple genres and really master them to benefit, trying to

understand every genre is insignificant. There are so many and they all have different attributes

and characteristics. Start by focusing on genres you interested in, because most of the time you

will end up writing about something you're interested in. For example, I really enjoy country

music, from the surface you may wonder how you could ever incorporate country into any sort

of paper, but if you really go deep into country music and explore the levels, you can find songs

and artists that you can relate with or songs or meanings that help further your point across.

Learning genres could seem like a waste of time from the outside, but the more you research the

more knowledge you will have for future writings. Everything comes back to research and

accepting that will make you a better writer and reader, and these are some very powerful tools.

Almost every single important thing that has been brought to attention started as a writing or

reading.