Deepan Patel Professor Suzanne Ingram English 1101-001 10 October, 2013 Genre Study Assignment- The Past to the

Present The text that I decided to analyze for this assignment was a five paragraph essay that I wrote during tenth grade in English class. The essay was a reflection on the book, The Nonexistent Knight, mainly explaining the importance of the code of chivalry, honors a knight has to maintain at all times, and how there is a structure of rules that people follow. The code of chivalry is a moral system that knights followed to strengthen a knight's skill during battle. Every knight followed this code in order to be considered a real knight and the honor that a knight consisted of doing was to stay by the king's side and do whatever was asked of the knight by the king. Through the code of chivalry a set of structure and rules were made to follow for the knights during the middle ages. The author of the five paragraph essay was me and was written in tenth grade in English class. When writing this essay the intended audience was my teacher and my classmates because everyone in the class read the book. After the essay was written we had read everyone else's essay and rated them using a number, 1-10, to grade it. Having our teacher do this peer-grading activity gave the input of everyone in the class rather than just the teacher. After grading was done each presenter would receive their grades and comments that were made. The main purpose for writing this essay was to show the importance of the code of chivalry in the book.

This code was a very important to the book because it was the central idea around the entire book. For example when the book starts off it shows King Charlemagne, the king, going up to every individual in front of his kingdom as he approaches his castle and asks them two questions; "Who are you and what do you do?" As he is doing this he spots a knight near the front of his castle in all white armor and asks him this question. The knight in white armor replies that he is a knight ready to serve you, the king, and that he abides by the code of chivalry. This is an important part of the book because not very far in to the book the knight already acknowledges that he relates his life to the code of chivalry. The king now asks him another question; what does this code mean to you?" The knight replies, "The code of chivalry is a what all knights must follow in order to have the strength and skill to face combat in violent battles but also temper this aggressive side of a knight with a chivalrous side to his nature. The king was impressed right away and left the knight content. While writing this essay it was imperative to look up the time period of this book and what the customs were in order to fully understand the text. Researching this information helped understand the book much more because it allowed me to understand what was normal and what people were accustomed to having occur. Implicit messages through the essay were that in order to be a good knight you had to abide by the code of chivalry. It never stated this clearly but implied it since only chosen knights by the king were ones who followed this. The structure of society is also implied because the king is at the top of society followed by the knights, then the people. This is implied because whenever the king went up to the people the people greeted him by bowing down to his feet. This is a sign that the king is above all since the people bowed down. Explicit messages through the essay were the code of chivalry, seventeen rules of chivalry, and what a knight must do if chosen to protect the king. The seventeen rules that had to be followed were; " to fear god and

protect the church, to serve the liege lord in valor and faith, to protect the weak and defenseless, to give succor to widows and orphans, to refrain from the giving of offense, to live by honor and glory, to despise pecuniary award, to fight for the welfare of all, to obey those placed in authority, to guard the honor of the fellow knights, to eschew unfairness, meanness and deceit, to keep faith, to always tell the truth, to respect the honor of women, to never refuse a challenge from an equal, and to never turn the back on a foe." The genre of this essay is a five paragraph essay because it consists of five paragraphs. Begins off with an introduction, followed by three body paragraphs that give detail about the book, and finishes with a conclusion that sums up the entirety of the paper. This type of genre only exists mainly in high school. Other than high school not many people write five paragraph essays with the same structure as this. Limitations with this specific genre are that it limits the author to only five paragraphs to write about what they have to. Because of this the paragraphs become longer and more detailed rather than shorter and specific points being made. I believe this tends to occur because students try to make their essay longer and not focus as much on the content as they should. This is what used to happen to me during high school because when I focused just on the content of what I wrote it tended to be a page or page and a half shorter than everyone elses in the class. After noticing this I began to prolong my paragraphs more just to make my essays longer. Another limitation is that when writing these essays it becomes repetitive preventing the writer to grow due to the lack of creativity. This prevents writers from growing because when writing five paragraph essays it becomes the same process over and over again. Advantages of this type of genre are that there is a limit in how much you write preventing you from rambling on about the topic. It also gives you a guideline on how to write your paper since you begin with an introduction, followed by three detailed body paragraphs, and

then a conclusion summing up the paper. Also because of the format of the five paragraph essay it does not allow for students writing to grow or expand. The format becomes very repetitive and limits how the student can write their essay. This text successfully fulfilled the author's purpose, which was; to write this essay in order to show the importance of the code of chivalry in the book. This was completed because the code of chivalry was explained throughout the text and given examples. However it was not the most successful way to explain the purpose. I think this because I don't feel you are able to get your entire point across with three paragraphs. If given the choice to do again I would not choice this genre because of the five paragraph essay format. Quality of Life Reflection The text that I decided to analysis for this assignment was an essay written for my Health and Quality of Life class. The essay was a reflection on an assignment that we had to complete that focused on a two week meal plan with hundred dollars to spend. The assignment put us in the mindset of people with Medicare, when given their monthly amount of money to spend food on. The money was only accepted in a grocery store and we had to spend at least a third of the money on fresh produce, diary, and/or meat products. The essay reflects on the task that had to be completed and the experience that occurred when going to the grocery store keeping track of the money spent on each item of food. The author of this essay was the teacher assistant in the class that also completed the assignment along with the entire class. The author's intended audience was the instructor along with the rest of class, showing the process he went through in order to complete the assignment. The process he had gone through was important because it allowed for him to explain the

individual processes that were achieved. The author's purpose was to explain what he had to do and the thought process he went through when going to the grocery store figuring out what he was going to eat for the entire month. In the essay there is a section where it explains the most difficult things, which was, to plan what he was going to eat each day because he was not accustomed to planning meals so far in advance. This also posed as a major problem because while describing in the reflection, having to stay under the maximum amount of one hundred dollars. Multiple grocery store simulations were attempted due to the fact that he was not able to get all of his groceries at one store. Through this purpose it can be concluded that the author wanted to focus mainly on a reflection aimed on the results of going through the grocery store simulation and explaining his thought process when buying his groceries. This can be determined by the two excerpts from the essay, Completing this assignment was a new experience for me. Checking the nutrition facts while trying to spend as little as I could was more difficult than I thought it would be. However with a little determination and research I was able to pull it off. and When deciding on what my meal plan should be with the one hundred dollars I had to spend for two weeks I thought about what I have ate usually since college began. Being a vegetarian my choices are more limited than those that eat meat. Since I am a vegetarian I eat a lot of vegetables daily and I tried to incorporate this into the assignment. Adding in the eggs and veggie burger replaces the protein lost from not eating meat. The first excerpt shows what the author felt and thought when trying to complete the assignment. With the second excerpt it shows his thought process on what types of foods he should buy and why he should buy them.

The message received by the audience also may have been of how not to approach the activity and how to properly approach your method of using the money received for food. The genre of this essay is primarily a reflection assignment. This type of genre exists whenever a person reflects on an experience that he or she has gone through. This genre is mainly used when an individual wants to focus on the specific things they did and explain what they did or how they felt. This genre is the most useful when wanting to reflect on your experiences because it allows for the author to only focus on themselves rather than anything else. This is important when using this genre because doing this lets the audience feel more of how the author is feeling and the emotions that they went through. The limitation of this type of genre is that it only allows you to reflect on one's own experience and not others. Even though this is an important element when using this genre reflecting on more than one persons experience would allow for the audience to become more involved because it gives them different points of view. From different points of view they can draw more conclusions and compare different experiences together. An advantage of this type of genre is that you can primarily focus on what has occurred to you and express certain things that have occurred to you. Including more than one experience could overwhelm the audience and could lead to confusion. The author of the essay makes the rules of this genre because they can format it however they want to. This is the beauty of reflections because it allows for you, the individual, to process the information that you have and then write it down however it makes the most sense for you. There is no specific way for the reflection to be written besides reflecting on your experience as a whole. The most important rule that is required for his genre is to make sure that the author reflects on their experiences and stays on topic when writing their reflections. Conclusion

While analyzing both the of the texts during the genre study I learned the different styles and approaches that were made in each of the writing assignments. During the five paragraph essay, there was more of a set structure and format that was needed to followed rather than the college reflection which needed very little format and structure because it differs from every individual. Writings that are associated with in college allow you to have more freedom while structuring your paper than you are able to in high school. Also the five paragraph essay limited my writing since everything that needed to be said could not have been in the five paragraphs and in the reflection there was no specific paragraph limit which allowed you to write as many of them to get your thoughts together and point across. For the five paragraph essay the rules that are associated with it consist of not going over five paragraphs and staying in the intended word limit. For the reflection written in college you are able to express what is needed to be expressed so that your point is stated. The rules that go along with this genre are that you have to reflect on whatever you experience. Doing this allows the reader to feel what the author felt and understand what they went through. There are no rules for this genre other than reflecting on a certain experience because each reflection focuses on a different topic. These genres help show that in high school writing teachers have more control over how and what the student writes rather than the student does themselves. This gives off the impression that students writing in high school is not as important because they are not to generate their own ideas or format the essay in a functioning way for the reader to understand what is going on. Instead they are forced to write in a specific format with guidelines so that the reader that reads it does not get confused and stay focused. However this changes in college because all of a sudden the students expectations change since there are given less guidelines and more freedom in their own writing. This was experienced when writing my reflection

because all the professor stated was, "Write a reflection on your experience in this assignment". That is it. You were able to format the rest of the reflection however you pleased as long as your opinion and experiences where written. Having now gone through the assignment I can know expect as a college student to have an open mind when having to write college essays. This is so because if having an open mind you have more ideas that formulate than you do it you focus on one specific aspect of writing. This concept can help with approaching college essays because of different genres that will be given to be me. This assignment has taught me that college genres tend to have more freedom when writing them.