“Navigating Genres” by Kerry Dirk was a quick and easy read due to his light and informal tone. Dirk was able to get his points across and educate while still maintaining interest. He knew his audience and the best way to approach the topic in a way that was entertaining yet informative.

It was interesting to me to think about genres in a way that each begin with a singular response from one person, and continues to grow by writers responding/citing back to the original first response. There is potentially a lack of authenticity;however, each genre continues to grow, expand, and vary in different ways. For example, horror movies can be radically different from one another, but still be labeled a horror film. This is when writing for a specific reaction from the audience comes in, which Dirk conveyed nicely through his examples of headlines from The Onion. 

It was helpful to get a different and broader outlook on genres and how to write in general. It seems as though writing with more freedom and not having specific rules pertaining to the genre will result in better writing. A few tips that stood out to me were having a goal for your writing and what you hope to accomplish, learn more about the topic and see how others have written about the topic and reactions they received in the past, and approach writing with the audience in mind. Also, to think about what type of reaction you want to receive from readers.