In her essay “Navigating Genres”, author Kerry Dirk breaks down the word “genre” and re-defines it through the use of examples, quotes, and humorous comparisons.  Since the essay’s primary audience is students, Dirk utilizes a conversational tone with the reader, which makes it both easy to read and understand.  While using this tone, she starts off her essay by making a comparison to country music.  She explains how every country song loosely follows the same kind of format, which is a basic way of introducing the idea of a genre.  She then goes on to talk about how genres are actually much more than just a “fill-in-the-blank” type of tool, and that the actual definition of genre is much more expansive. (Dirk, page 250).  She describes how genres are also dependent upon the audience of the writing and the expected response from the reader.  According to Dirk, “…we choose between horror movies and chick flicks not only because we are familiar with their forms but because we know what response they will elicit from us…” (Dirk, page 254).  She also provides a list of headlines from the fictitious newspaper, The Onion, in order to demonstrate how they were engineered to be informative but also produce laughter from the reader.  In order to further help the reader understand, Dirk creates a scenario where she’s kidnapped someone’s daughter and she wants to write a ransom note.  She creates three ransom notes, but the clear and most obvious choice is the note that elicits a frightful and urgent response from the reader.  After she’s finished giving all of her examples, Dirk ends the essay by giving some advice to the reader for future writings about how to effectively use genres.