jl [2006-08-11 10:26:20 +0000 UTC]

Now I understand at least a little bit what you're doing Your conclusion was somewhat enlightening (as conclusions are supposed to be) and your bibliography is interesting (nice how you smuggled Lewis and Tolkien in )

Bateson and Goffman were of central importance in my M.A. thesis in Cultural Anthropology. In performance theory, you can't do without "framing" - but we're much more interested in the "live action" side of this theory: for example, an opera diva fainting in her death scene critically misjudged the frame she was in - only her role was dying, but she took it for real, anyway.

Malinowski is of course the founding father of cultural anthropology per se. But we mostly got in contact with his fieldwork on the Trobriand islands.

Todorov is of great importance for my current project (as is Tolkien's 'Tree and Leaf'); he formulated one of the two most important definitions on the theory of fantastic literature (the other one being by Roger Caillois.) His definition however is so narrow it often becomes useless. Stanislaw Lem hated him for it

An impressive job you did there. I hope you will have it finished & done asap, so you can lean back for a while. I wish my thesis also was almost finished instead of almost started!

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robertsloan2 [2006-04-27 08:42:22 +0000 UTC]

Hehehe. I love your Acknowledgements. It's so familiar to see [Insert acknowledgement here] from some of my own rough drafts.

Reading your table of contents, it's great. It actually functions as a tight little outline that gives me an overview of the information right off. So far so good -- I've read indices and tables of contents on other theses and academic writing that didn't have this much good content and had serious obfuscation right from the first page. Just on an outline review: you have real content. I have a good idea of what it is from your table of contents.

Since you mentioned in our discussion that your concept of academic writing is tight, content-heavy, well organized and logical -- you succeeded. Whoohoo!

I'm not sure what the Abstract is, but it's handled in much the same amusing way as Acknowledgements and I trust you know how to work one up according to the formal expectations of your university. I suspect it might be something like the synopsis for a novel submission -- am I right? What's the average length for an abstract?

I'm starting to understand why you read 5,000 pieces of business correspondence and seeing how it was actually interesting to do so. LOL -- neat. This may actually be useful to me in writing science fiction, or parody, or both. I'm hooked so far.

I'm interested in genre theory and wonder how it relates to writing SF, fantasy, horror and how-to vs. writing romance, mystery and other genres I don't do. I suspect there are some connections between 'genre' as I know it and 'genre' as sociolinguists know it.

Chapter two introduces the correspondence department of a loyalty program: the business community on which this research is focussed. Is "focussed" correct British spelling? If it is, I won't flag Britishisms as typos, but if that is one, well, it's help right? I may not be line editing the whole thing but I will post stuff I notice.

Genres as you're discussing them include business writing as a genre, maybe IM as a genre, chat rooms as a genre, email as a genre, all the different in-group types of writing that characterize particular communities. Fannish jargon and in-jokes like "ghod" or "fanfic" or "fanac" are a genre in themselves separate from the genres of SF and fantasy that gave rise to the subculture. Is that about right? Some of your sources think of these genres as fixed and unchanging, others that they're fluid and respond rapidly to social changes.

I liked the observation you brought in that different genres vary in how static or fluid they are, may go through stages of development, and may otherwise just vary. When you list sonnets, odes, tragedies, myths and legends as genres, that illustrated your point: sonnets are a very static form and I can't imagine any changes to the genre of "sonnet" without its losing its identity as a sonnet, while legends can be written in many different ways from alliterative sagas to fat-volume prose trilogies popularizing them in the style of modern epic fantasy. In a century, legends may be told in completely different ways with a style of language that makes ours seem archaic and quaint.

Your examples gave me the meaning of genre as your sources use it when I'm not part of the academic community and haven't read any of your sources. One thing I've noticed so far in the prose is that it's simple, clean and readable with very little obfuscating verbiage. There's no fluff. You're standing back to give an overview of many different opinions on the topic but they're all boiled down into coherent easily understood prose. The topic is meaty enough and useful enough that you might after getting your PhD, consider rewriting it and submitting it as a mainstream pop-science book -- it would not take much work to lighten it a little and bring its readability level and style closer to something like Alvin Toffler's books. It would probably be useful and entertaining to writers, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, the ambitious and those curious about sociology and language. Most intelligent readers might at least give it a glance.

Obviously the style would be different, but it would be an easier rewrite than most academic papers I've read. Or even popular science writing -- I have a great book on sabertooths and big cats right now on my reading list that's going slow because no matter how much I love cats and extinct animals, the prose is more difficult, slow and obscure than yours.

That's a nice quote that attempts to understand genre by text alone treats socially constructed categories as stable natural facts.

That's true of a lot of things, not just understanding genre by text alone. So far this is fascinating and it raises all sorts of interesting ideas for me.

The way you break your sections gives me a nice chunk to digest, then leads sensibly to the next. I noticed I was on 1.3 and engaged in your content, both following your ideas and stimulated to many ideas of my own. This is a good read. It's still genre -- it's still, barely, academic -- but it's readable and stimulating in ways that much academic writing isn't. If quality of writing affects your reception, I think it's going to be a smash hit. I might be wrong, because I've seen so many examples of difficult academic writing with serious grammatical problems. But you're talking about exactly that topic, the impact of social expectations and roles on language and genres. I also know as many professors and doctoral level experts who rail against bad academic writing as those who defend it, so you're probably better off writing this well. It'll certainly establish you as someone intelligent, well-read, good at research and a stunningly good writer.

Actually, it reminds me of a couple of psychology articles I read that were academic and this understandable. It's just great writing. I'm impressed. I know this isn't the type of critique you'd asked for in selecting critique-heavy comments, but maybe it's still useful feedback to know that you're convincing someone who usually loathes academic writing that it can be stimulating, readable and entertaining. You might even be engaging in overkill when it comes to quality, but I don't think that'll hurt your prospects at all.

You're citing a large number of research sources. This is another thing that got graded highly in college backgrounds, and I think you'll get points for citing contradictory ones and examining the flaws and benefits of their views on the subject. This is an area that I fell short on when I wrote college essays, citing relatively few sources unless I disagreed with them. Eh, a good reason I'm a fiction writer and not a grad student.

You didn't use a term I wasn't familiar with until section 1.3.2: This notion of genre requires a group of texts whose common function is a commonly recognised set of purposes, synchronically and diachronically, and this idea implies that a group or community of people have, for some length of time, commonly-held goals. Where common words served, you used common words. This is powerful writing. By the way, what exactly does diachronically mean? If you adapted this for popular reading, the definition ought to be in there somewhere close to its use.

Toward the end of section 1.3.4 -- Often, they are formalised: recognised by management they become an official response.

This would be improved by a comma or additional word for clarification, like "recognised by management, they become an official response." Or "once recognised by management, they become an official response" or "if recognised by management, they become an official response." Hmm. In all alternate versions I came up with, the comma's needed. So I guess I am doing a couple of line edits if I spot something I think could be improved.

I can believe that you've rewritten each sentence of this that many times, because it shows that level of polish. I'm not finding many line edit suggestions to make. Of course, you may be better at line editing than I am -- but I'm pretty good at weeding out passive voice, weasel words and fluff. I'm just not finding any in your text and what qualifiers you use are necessary and appropriate. I think the ones I object to in academic writing are the unnecessary qualifiers applied the way they sometimes are in business writing -- to create deniability of the author's actual opinion or view, to obscure that opinion or view, or to give an impression that view is some sort of objective fact being described by a waffling humble nonentity. In other academic writing, I've seen both in the same paragraph, incidentally -- denial of responsibility for the author's own views and work, plus the trick of making the subjective seem objective.

Well, I've reached 1.4.2 and so far it's very enjoyable, informative and packed with interesting content. It's late and I'm not going to try to review a 70,000 word document in one sitting -- but thank you for posting it. I hope these comments are helpful -- and I'm glad my intuitive guess was right. You have a natural advantage in doing your thesis because you were already a good writer to begin with.

70,000 words isn't an overwhelming scale of writing for anyone who's used to writing novels. It's a nice short novel or nonfiction book. In this one, I think you also have a basis for a good popular science book that could easily be written on the same topic with the same research in a different style. It's making me think about a lot of things. I like your reasoned critical tone -- you cite these numerous other authorities and their interesting views, then critique them. It reminds me of something in paleontology where cladistic nomenclature and Linnaean nomenclature reveal completely different sets of information when considering the lineage of animals.

It's also relevant to me as a genre writer when my genres usually are not taught or defined in a hard arbitrary way. In every horror writer or horror reader discussion online that I've participated, the question "What is Horror?" comes up. The only conclusion that ever comes out of this wide-ranging discussion is "it's written to scare the reader." Yet some horror stories aren't as scary as the suspense or horrific elements in SF, fantasy, mainstream thriller and other genres. I've got my own cynical definition of horror "stress the gooshy bit in the query so that you can get paid twice as much as if you called it SF or fantasy" but that's just a market definition -- horror readers in my observation want a morality story with a strong comeuppance and maybe some snickering humor at the expense of the victim, including the comeuppance at the end where the monster becomes victim.

But that's only one sort of horror and many other things go into the genre. In a way my cynical definition is as valid as any -- if it gets a black cover and a larger advance, it's horror.

When it comes to analyzing the genre of business letters, that may be applicable for me later on in strengthening my ability to write a subset of them: queries as a subgenre of sales letters. I've read plenty of boilerplate articles on how to write winning queries, but the formula isn't quite enough to get success. An ability to do great one-liners is part of the pitching skills that make some writers thrive while equally good writers have long delays and fewer sales. All in all this looks like a pretty interesting read. I'm glad I saved it and I will come back to finish it and make a few more comments... if it keeps holding my attention again the way it has so far, you're in effect getting a whole-novel read out of me.

Hehehe, hope that counts for *FantasyWritersUnited as participation?

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alienhead [2006-01-25 02:30:02 +0000 UTC]

And this is exactly why I won't be attempting a PhD in anything.

I think I'd rather take the Mark Twain approach--write for about thirty years and then have some prestigious university just give me an honorary degree.

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CageyButterfly [2005-10-17 19:59:35 +0000 UTC]

pretty close, don't you think?



(I downloaded it...We'll see...I actually enjoy linguistics studied...I just don't care much for coorporate minded zombie~weirdness

Best to you, Paul

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adrift [2005-10-02 05:08:36 +0000 UTC]

a 2.5mb word document...

you scare me.

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opacus-somnium [2005-09-24 06:40:25 +0000 UTC]

I lost about ten pages on a story once because of a faulty floppy disk and I didn't write anything after that for nearly a year (of course I was probably twelve at the time and emotionally fragile, but that's beside the point ). Back up copies are always good. You can never have too many, heh.

Aha, I don't have MS Word on my computer! Your document is not compatible with my word processor and thus I have a valid excuse not to read it. Somehow I don't think that'll bother you much. It's likely I would've gotten lost in the first paragraph and abandoned my attempt anyway..

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danielzklein [2005-09-21 14:23:25 +0000 UTC]

I'm saving a local copy of it, just in case your computer AND dA should break

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bastardepiphany [2005-09-21 12:06:21 +0000 UTC]

I don't even want to know how to make the words appear.

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GunShyMartyr [2005-09-21 10:37:25 +0000 UTC]

...Dear... ...dear god...

I'll never complain about writing an essay ever again.

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