The Ins, Outs, and In-Betweens of Multigenre Writing

Abstract

my colleagues of the value of this type of assignment. Several of my colleagues generously took the time after the meeting to look through the projects and celebrate their excellence. Sharing my students' writing is a wonderful way to let my work as an educator speak for my methodology, but I owe myself and my colleagues a more thoughtful analysis of the academic virtues of multigenre projects. My strongest motivation for studying multigenre writing is the compelling responses of my students who have authored writing projects that have awed me with their power and elegance. I am moved to think of my students' writing as more than reports or papers. They are works of art, not simply because of their visual or poetic inclusions, but because of their aesthetic meaningfulness. For support of my point about aesthetics, I turn to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian literary critic, whose scholarship masterfully presents a similar case for accepting the dialogic language of the novel as art. Yet as I do so, I fully realize that some would not accept the mixed quality of these multigenre projects as academic writing. Perhaps the most persuasive argument that I can marshal to convince others of the usefulness of the multigenre assignment is that this type of writing requires much more in the way of academic skills than the minimal requisites of the traditional monogenre research paper. Combining these two perspectives, to foster writing as both an art and a skill, demonstrates how multigenre writing can be utilized to teach critical analysis, documentation of sources, and aesthetic unity. Before examining multigenre writing in more depth, I need to respond to the myth of the traditional college research paper format. most authoritative voice that I can invoke on this matter is that of composition scholar and journal editor, Richard Larson. In his article, The 'Research Paper' in the Writing Course: A Non-Form of Writing, he explains that universities house a plethora of conflicting disciplines, all of which have competing notions of what academic research requires. I would add to Larson's critique that in any one area of study such as polymer engineering, market research, or geriatric sociology, what qualifies as research itself has probably changed significantly in the last twentyfive years and will continue to change, perhaps even more rapidly in the future. Understandably, high school teachers and general education professors harbor the unrealistic desire that one report format could be decided upon that would satisfy all of the disciplines and all of the courses at the university. If