Out of all of the genres that we have studied this semester, one of the genres that I felt like I had come in with a solid understanding of was the Persuasive Genre. In my school right now, the students have been working on an argumentative essay regarding Romeo and Juliet, arguing whether or not teens
are impulsive regarding the decisions that they make in the play. As I had been helping them write their essays, I felt like I had a pretty strong grasp on the genre itself, but after the workshop and reading more in depth with Tompkins, I feel as though I have a different perspective on the whole persuasive genre, specifically more so with the three ways to persuade:
appeal to reason,
character, and
emotion (Tompkins, 2012, p. 252). I guess when I used to think about the persuasive genre, I used to think it was just giving straight, convincing facts in order to persuade someone else into believing your point, but I sidelined the appeal to
character and
emotion.
I think where I developed a more deep and principled understanding of this, was looking at the advertisements and the mentor texts. First with the advertisement activity that my peers led me through, we were able to look at a real world example of a persuasion. In our group, someone brought in an advertisement for Sephora with Selena Gomez on the cover of the advertisement. In this example, we were able to notice the appeal to character, Selena Gomez being an important person we could trust, and reason, trusting facts about the product she was selling. By seeing this real life example of persuasion, it helped to further understand how the three specific components come into play.
Regarding the mentor texts that we have been bringing into class, I would argue that they have been extremely helpful in assisting my own knowledge of these genres. For example, visualizing and seeing how these genre's play out in a story format helps me not only to see the purpose of the stories, but also the
audience and
voice...key components to any story. By attaching these genres to specific characters and their narratives, it helps to first see the formatting of these genres, and see their important components come through. For example, with my genre expert group, reading through our mentor texts helped us to see that biographies are essential for telling individuals stories. For the
persuasion group, seeing the appeal to reason play out in
Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type, helped me to better understand those specific appeals for persuasion. I think these mentor texts should be used across classrooms, elementary through high school to help students better understand these types of genres.
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