Genres Final [Berger]

The purpose of the college application essay is to write an essay that answers a prompt that the college(s) use as a determinant on who they do and do not admit. Typically, the college essay has loose formatting which allows the students to write how they wish but they do have to stay within the word limit. Even though I had not written a college application essay before, I still knew what I had to accomplish. My goal was to be unique and ultimately write an essay that got me accepted into a college. According to Dirk, this concept is called action. Action, in writing, is the purpose of what the writer is writing about even if they have never written that genre before. As a student writing these essays, I had to also consider who is reading the essays and what the college was looking for. In order to do this, I had to consider what Dirk calls location or how the audience’s expectations shape the assignment. Every college is unique which means every essay should also be unique and cater to that specific college. As a genre, the location for college application essays forces students to expand the truth in order to seem more decorated and unique. I did this by talking about when I bought my pet turtle and used words liked rescued and talked about how it was being attacked by the other turtle in the tank. While this all happened, the turtles were mostly likely just playing and were in a healthy tank in a pet store. Lastly, Dirk talks about rhetorical situations or situations where we know the outcome and act on it assuming the most likely outcome occurs. Examples she used were expecting a laugh from a joke or expecting a response from an email. In the college application essay, I do not think there is a rhetorical situation because we do not know the outcome on whether we will be admitted or not, though we can predict which school we have a more likely chance of getting into.

One thought on “Genres Final [Berger]

  1. Peyton, this is a reasonable overview, but to make your post more effective, you should more explicitly engage with Dirk’s concepts of rhetorical situation, action, and location. You should also provide specific detail about the ways in which you tried to meet the demands of the genre in your own essays.

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