In the essay “Navigating Genres” by Kerry Dirk, the author embarks on a journey to educate the reader (the college student) on the definition of genre. He further goes on explaining how every different situation in life (be it writing in different classes or writing a letter to your friend or your professor) will have different genres, thus a different type of writing. While reading this essay there were two main things that stood out to me as the reader, Dirk’s ease at grasping my attention and his ability at expressing his point through his various examples.

What struck me the most was Dirk’s ability to catch my attention as a reader, and truly have me engaged while reading his essay. This is primarily because of Dirk’s warm tone and his ability to structure his essay in a way that was almost conversational and partly because he was able to integrate his own experience throughout the essay.

Through the authors use of countless real life examples, Dirk was able to do an extremely good job at conveying his point. For example by simply giving three different examples of how a ransom note should or should not be written I was able to grasp the main idea of the essay. Just as every situation has a different set of steps that should be followed every different situation has a certain genre that is used to better achieve your desired outcome.

By choosing to write his essay based on this certain structure and focusing on making his ideas approachable, not only was Dirk able to show us first hand what an essay written for college students looked like but how it helped strengthen his argument.