Wardle and Miller

The author of the first article is Elizebeth Wardle, Howe Professor of English and Director of the Roger and Joyce Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University. Her primary audience for this piece is students. She implied that genre is the way we write for a specific audience. She implies this because of the way she talks about how people write. She claims that when people write, they always have an audience in mind, whether it is a boss, a family member, yourself, or so on. She claims that in every scenario, the way you write is affected by your audience, and, therefore, you can’t learn to “write in general,” because these writing skills are rarely completely transferable from one task to another. This text is trying to inform students about how difficult writing truly is, and that the myth that learning to write in general is a dangerous concept and needs to stop. 

The author of the second article is Carolyn Miller, an Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University. The primary audience for this text is other rhetorics and scholars in her field. This article says that genre is a social action, and a rhetorical means for mediating private intentions and social exigence. She also says that genres can change, evolve, and decay, and that the amount of genres in any society is indeterminate and depends on the complexity and diversity of a society. Miller’s claim is that the definition of genre should not be centered on the substance or the form of discourse, but on the action it is used to accomplish. She explains this examining the connection between genre and rhetorical situation, as well as show how hierarchical models of communication relate and highlight genre. Her purpose is to inform her audience on the definition of genre and the use of genre in rhetorical situations, discourses, and society as a whole.