Nice Surprises

elements, pixabay CC0 Creative Commons

I had a nice surprise this morning, and another one last week. 

This morning, a newsletter appeared from the provost's office in my university that featured "Faculty in their Prime." I was one of them! I was surprised to be included at all among such great colleagues (I didn't know about it ahead of time). I was also surprised both by the "prime" part and by the bio featuring my blog! It was great to see this public adventure of mine receiving attention instead of the usual list of my scholarly works. Thank you!

The other nice surprise this past week was the arrival of actual physical copies of my most recent book, Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Genre Studies, co-edited with my colleague and friend Carolyn Miller. I had known that Routledge had published it on their website, but I hadn't seen the actual book, and somehow that physical copy made it real. Thank you to Routledge!

So in recognition of my two nice surprises this week, I want to point folks to some of my blog posts that might help them see why I find genre so fascinating. After all, I've been writing this thing weekly over two years now, and there's a lot of stuff to sort through over in the Previous Posts and Archives lists. And most people don't think of genre the way I (and others in my field) do--as the ways we get things done in the world, as expectations about how to act, not just what forms to use. As things that can show us ourselves and our communities.

After I'd hit my two years (plus some) anniversary last August, I wrote a post about how my blog came to be, and it references lots of the topics I write about and some of my favorite posts: How to Birth A Blog It would be a good one to start with, if you're interested.

An overview post explains how I see genre in two pictures. To play with a particular genre we use all the time, I wrote a series on how to make a good (and bad) apology. I still use the practical advice in that one to make my apologies meaningful. Teachers and students tell me they like the series I did on the syllabus as a genre. Turns out the syllabus reveals a lot about our roles and expectations.

On a more disheartening note, I've written about how genres, with their usual ways of getting things done, can make things seem normal that we could and should be challenging. One I wrote about was the normalizing of a Nazi sympathizer through a New York Times profile on him.

But the normal ways of doing things can vary, too. Recently, I wrote about how Aretha Franklin's funeral and John McCain's funeral were so different from one another, even as they were both recognizably funerals.

I hope you might have some time to browse around in the blog. I talk a lot about how Words Matter, too. Maybe as you browse, you'll find a nice surprise yourself, something that makes you laugh or think. If you do, I hope you'll let me know.

And my thanks again for two nice surprises this past week. May your week bring you your own nice surprise.

Lisa Risager, Jeg kan godt li' at gi' gaver! flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)