Genre-colored glasses |
Thoughts on genre, language, grammar, and other
rhetorical and linguistic norms |
Genre-colored glasses |
Thoughts on genre, language, grammar, and other
rhetorical and linguistic norms |
The Psychology of Genre What a perfect way to finally* launch my blog. The New York Times on Sunday published a piece in the Opinion section on “The Psychology of Genre: Why we don’t like what we struggle to categorize,” by Tom Vanderbilt. Thank you!! Vanderbilt has written a great review of the research in psychology on the brain’s inclination to categorize and some results of that inclination. The whole article is well worth spending one of your free articles a month on, if you don’t subscribe (I’m a subscriber, so at least I’ve paid for sharing some of this research). Most exciting for me is how thoroughly and consistently the research in psychology supports what rhetorical genre scholars have been theorizing and discovering in their research. Here are some of the findings from psychology, explained by Vanderbilt.
Image from Huffington Post
You can see why I was so excited reading this article. It offers psychological backing for many claims of rhetorical genre studies: that we put symbolic acts into generic categories, that those genres are social as well as cognitive and shape us even as we shape them, but that genres are not fixed and we can change them. But beware, especially with our students, of the habits of mind that genres can instill and make difficult to disrupt. What a cool article! And what great research. I’m ready to pick up Tom Vanderbilt’s most recent book, You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice (Knopf, 2016). What connections do you make to this psychological research? Any of your favorite genre examples or bits of genre research? Other connections you see? PS A special friend and fellow thinker about categories pointed out to me that this research is also just a step away from supporting the claims of cognitive metaphor studies, too. From this research to prototype theory to the shaping power of cognitive metaphors. *(Yes, I know that’s a split infinitive, you grammar nerds like me. Perfectly appropriate in my blog, and not the last informal usage you’ll see. And all other placements of “finally” in that sentence are potentially ambiguous—is it the launch of my blog or the perfect way to launch that is finally happening? In any case, I am finally taking the leap to launch my blog, after months of drafting potential entries, today fighting off all my fears of getting it wrong.) Image from Funny Animal blogspot
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