Genre Transfer in Developing Adult Writers (Popken)

How is it that developing writers draw strategies and principles from discourses they already have some control over and apply them to discourses they are trying to acquire? (3)

...adults nearly always acquire written language against a backdrop of writing they have previously experienced. Therefore, a distinguishing characteristic of adult written discourse acquisition is the point of transition between the discourses they are familiar with and the ones they are not (3).

...what has yet to be explored are the specific discourse strategies that writers use within their global movement into community knowledge--i.e. how adults simultaneously look back (to previous discourses) and look ahead (to ones they are trying to acquire). What I am suggesting, in other words, is that we approach written discourse acquisition similarly to the way second language acquisition has been studied by English as Second Language theorists: by looking at the interplay of discourse1 (the known) and discourse2 (the unknown) in the acquisition process. (4)

The present paper explores how adult writers perceive and acquire the conventions of unfamiliar discourses through the conventions of their already experienced ones. (4-5)

...much of what acquiring written discourses really comes down to is acquiring fluency with genres of a community. Moreover, beyond this initial acquisition, "development" for a writer amounts to two things: constantly enlarging the number of genres one controls and, as Mikhail Bahktin suggests, appropriating genres for one's own, using them creatively. (80). (5)

The transition made by writers from genres they have experienced into ones they have not is extremely pronounced when college freshmen move into the scholarly community. However, any of us can also experience transitions from the unknown to known genres throughout our personal or professional lives. (5)

I am using the term "written genre transfer" to refer to a predominant strategy during the "interdiscourse state"--a condition during which some writers fill the void in their control of an unfamiliar genre by using properties from genres they are familiar with. (6)

Positive/negative genre transfer (see p. 6/7)

Moreover, a writer's storehouse of previously-experienced genres is not necessarily limited to the ones he/she has actually written. Though evidence is somewhat tentative in this area, theorists such as Stephen Krashen argue that writers can acquire discourse by reading. Marcia Farr and Harvey Daniels suggest that when people read they

unconsciously internalize the patterns of written language they are encountering at many levels, including vocabulary, sentence varieties, ways of addressing the reader, strategies for achieving textual cohesion, patterns of organization, means of supporting assertions or providing details, and other elements of written language. (60)

It is likely, then that genre properties which developing writers bring to new contexts are fragmented bits and pieces of previously written or read texts. In some writers these fragmented remembrances of texts past seem to pop up at any time to interfere. (8)

...the rhetorical demands which students encounter outside our work with them are often quite different from what they have encountered in our classes. (12)

...if we know more about the transfer strategy, we can probably do more to prepare for writing in those novel contexts.