Bawarshi's "Ecology of Genre"

FINALLY! Finally an article that explains how writing is an ecology- through genre! Bawarshi articulates how writer and context have a symbiotic relationship in the same way that a microorganism and its ecosystem do: "a writer and his or her rhetorical environment are always in the process of reproducing one another, so that "environment" is not some vague backdrop against which writers enact their rhetorical actions; instead, the environment becomes in critical ways part of the very rhetorical action that writers enact." (70). Bawarshi boils down Cooper's rather dense theory to a few key notions, then attempts to explain "rhetorical ecosystems." He writes, "We are constantly in the process of reproducing our contexts as we communicate within them, speaking and writing about our realities and ourselves to the extent that discourse and reality cannot be separated." (71). This seems like kind of a radical notion, because we like to assume that there is some objective reality that we are dropped into, but really, I guess reality is more like this big open forum that we are all contributing to.

Bawarshi places a big emphasis on rhetorical contexts and the ways in which the agreed upon rhetoric shapes our notions of the "reality" we are experiencing. It is interesting to think that in any new place that you travel to, you will be faced with and most likely seek out rhetorical clues that might distinguish that place from another place or help you decide what your role in that place will be. People might have certain notions about what Paris is like as a city and culture, and they may try to adapt themselves based on rhetorical clues given in movies or travel guides to fit in with the "spirit" of Paris. It is interesting to try to think of a place apart from its context, its mythology, its representation in films and literature. Places are just places (physically, geographically) in the way that all writing is a collection of words into paragraphs into documents. It is the rhetoric of these things that make them mean something to us, help us figure our place within them.

It was nice to read some genre analysis examples. The girl's one about first year compositions seemed a little below register to me.