Learning a genre. I spoke with a student blogger today. She had been writing long posts and was frustrated with how much work they took and how infrequently she was able to post new content. I urged her a few weeks ago to experiment with shorter posts, and she accepted that advice. Now the site has a mix of short and long posts, and the short posts are for the moment more energetic, more tightly focused than the longer ones -- better in certain ways, though the raw material in the longer posts is also very promising.

It is a process of learning a genre, then -- abandoning the posts that are the length of school papers and that sound to some degree like school papers in favor of a shorter, more varied, more flexible genre or group of them that we don't really have any name for except blog post. It's hard to learn a genre until you've read fairly deeply in it and tried repeatedly to write in it -- so we should expect new student blogs to be rough, fuzzy in their sense of genre.

And how can we speed up the process of learning a new genre? I'm not sure. I recall learning from literature and writing teachers who showed me how they read a particular work. In doing so, they started to show how to read other works like it -- the genre -- and my sense of the genre started to grow. Maybe we should be workshopping blog entries, then,showing students how others read their work? I think so. [0 & P]