WP1 Reflection:

At first I thought the process of translating any genre into a new one would be very

difficult, however I found most parts of this writing assignment to be easy. I actually found this

assignment to be creative and more entertaining than a typical writing assignment. Getting to

translate an academic article about something that I am interested in like gene editing and

CRISPR technology seemed very appealing and I was up for a challenge. When I first heard

what we had to do for this assignment, I knew that I would want to do a podcast. I had written a

podcast script for another class last year and it was really fun so I thought I could try it again.

The first step I took in starting my genre translation was reading my academic article and

scooping out the important parts that would need to make it into my genre translation. I think this

was a crucial step for the translation process because it would be necessary for the overall

effectiveness of my genre translation. Reading my academic article gave me a good

understanding of the topic which not only increased my interest in the subject, but also allowed

me to effectively make my podcast script. The next thing that I did was assess the genre

conventions of my current academic article versus the genre conventions of a podcast to make

sure that I didn’t violate any important conventions when making my translation. One major

convention of a podcast is to be conversational and casual. This is a lot different from the

conventions of an academic article. Academic articles are very formal and non conversational.

This was the major difference between the two genres that I had to switch between. The length

différent is also another genre convention that is different between the two. I had to condense a

lot of the information from the academic article to fit into the podcast format. Before taking this

course, I didn’t know what genre conventions were, let alone be able to identify conventions of
different genres and what made them unique from one another. Now, I think I can confidently

and easily identify most of what makes up different genres of writing.

In the article, “Genre in the Wild”, Lisa Bickmore said that sometimes when you write,

the genre is already chosen. But sometimes you have the opportunity to decide which genre is

best for your writing. Finding the best genre requires some critical imagination and research. You

have to imagine the writing situation and the genres that might respond well to the situation. This

was one of the ways that I was able to choose a podcast. I thought that I would be able to convey

the content of my article by presenting it in a casual way that a podcast allows. Genres are often

stable, fluid, and evolving and behave in typical ways that we can observe in repeated or

persistent situations. Bickmore’s analysis of a genre was extremely helpful in this writing

assignment because it made it clear that you can conform most genres into something that can

work for you.

I also really enjoyed the article, “Navigating Genres”. Kerry Dirk discusses how the

definition of genre has changed as genres are now being viewed as more than rhetorical

situations. He explains that identifying how a genre functions rhetorically is essentially just

understanding what response you are trying to get. The rhetorical function of a podcast is to

inform listeners on the topic that is being discussed. Dirk’s analysis of genre helped me with this

project because it made it clear that I have to look at the rhetorical function of a podcast in order

to effectively translate my article. Academic articles have lots of information so it wasn’t that

hard for me to be able to get all the information I needed for my genre translation. Understanding

the rhetorical function made it easier to identify what information I needed to include and what

information was unnecessary for my podcast. After realizing the rhetorical function of a podcast,

I knew that I would need to exclude most of the dense information such as the scientific jargon
and the most of the research that was done so that I could not only conform to the genre

conventions of a podcast but also stick to the rhetorical functions. My thought was that a podcast

is very casual and informal. A lot of my content was very specific to people in the field of gene

editing, so a normal audience wouldn’t really understand or be able to follow most of the

conversation. This is why I thought that cutting out a lot of the technical details would be

necessary for my gene translation. I figured that the best way to do this was to pull out the basic

information that would aid with understanding as well as the other parts of the article that were

important parts of the research. I left out a lot of information that I didn’t think was necessary or

needed in a podcast, such as technical details on how CRISPR goes into the cell to edit the DNA.

Other technical ideas or scientific jargon that didn’t assist with understanding was cut out. The

article was very scientifically written so a lot of it wouldn’t have fit in a casual conversation.

Lastly, reading “Learn with Steph” from Starting Lines also really helped me understand

how to format my podcast. After seeing how D’Aloisio formatted their podcast and constructed a

casual conversation out of an academic article, I knew that I wanted to try the same with a topic

like CRISPR and gene editing. I knew that my podcast would be much simpler than this example

because the author had many different authors in the conversation and I was just using one. One

thing I noticed about the formatting was that each speaker had really long paragraphs that didn’t

seem to flow in a natural conversation. I felt that in a natural podcast one person wouldn’t be

talking for that long so I figured that I would try to improve that in my podcast.

Overall, I am really satisfied with the way my genre translation turned out. I loved seeing

that I was able to turn an academic article about gene editing into an informal podcast

conversation. At first I thought this assignment would be slightly difficult and challenging. I

never thought that you could take something so complicated and full of scientific jargon into an
informal conversation like a podcast, but I am happy I was able to complete the task, and do it

well. I now understand all the writing genres and all of the forms they come in. I can confidently

say that now I am able to use resources and skills from our readings and lectures to switch

between genres.

References:

1. Bickmore, Lisa. “Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre within Rhetorical

Ecosystems.” SLCC, 1 Aug. 2016

2. Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres” Colostate, 2010.

3. D’Aloisio, Georgia. “Learn with Steph” Starting Lines, 2022