894 Case study responses

I enjoyed reading Megan’s and Star’s applications of genre theory to OoS’s that were quite novel to me. They were using genre theory, a theory that I am pretty familiar with, but applying it to, in Megan’s case, World of Warcraft genre sets and in Star’s, to an art museum.  I have only used genre theory to look at documents, so I enjoyed seeing the ways that they described genres that were more emphatically multimodal and worked within very different activity systems.  I’m a big fan of genre theory, so I always enjoy reading applications of the theory, but it was fascinating to see how it works in these less familiar contexts.  In both cases, it was interesting to see how users employed the genres in very different ways than the textual forms that I usually work with.  I usually look at genres that do some type of knowledge work, and of course these do, but these are more experiential, too.  Incidentally, both of Megan and Star were much stronger at including descriptive details of their OoS than I was.  I spent more time laying out the theory that I was using and defining terms, so I gave short shrift to the details of my OoS.  Since I was over the word count, I don’t know exactly how to do well on both, but I would like to better balance the two in the future.