Julia Gore Writ 2

Reflecting on Genre Translation

The project of translating an academic article into a different genre was super enjoyable

to complete and filled with many ups and downs. Some of the aspects of my project were found

to be very simple, while some others were very challenging and pushed me to think outside of

the box in order to complete certain tasks. Every stage of preparation introduced a new aspect

and a new challenge, that lead to me using many different approaches and techniques that I have

learned. Overall, this project allowed me to look at writing from a different perspective and

introduced new aspects of writing, such as different audiences and the purpose of genres, that I

was able to learn about and experience.

During the first stage of this project, I read an article written by Brian Wilson, called

“What Students and Recruiters Report Regarding Public Accounting Internships.” While reading

the article that I would eventually be translating into a new genre, I was able to use a new aspect

of reading that allowed me to open my mind to a new perspective of writing. In Mike Bunn’s

article “How to Read Like A Writer,” he expresses that as you are reading, you should, “locate

what you believe are the most important writerly choices represented in the text…to consider the

effect of those choices on potential readers.”1 This new information was fresh in my mind, and

allowed me to notice details in the article that I usually would not. Some of these details included

my being able to notice bias in the writing, the style of the writing, and certain features that the

author decided to include. This enabled me to better understand what the author was trying to

portray and achieve when writing this article. For example, I noticed that the author only

included 1 or 2 consequences relative to the benefits of interning at an accounting firm. From

this observation, it became clear to me that the author was a strong advocate for accounting

internships, and this created bias in the paper. However, this also helped me when writing my
1
Mike Bunn, “How to Read Like A Writer.” Readings on Writing, Writing Spaces, 2011, 72.

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transcript of an interview with the author, to know where he stood and his opinions on these

internships.

When pondering about what type of genre to translate my academic article into, there

were many that could have fit this topic. However, I wanted to be able to include and extenuate

this potential bias. When I thought of the idea of a mock interview with Wilson, I found it

appropriate because it would include the bias that I recognized. Lisa Bickmore provided

guidance in this process of navigating a new genre, saying, “When a writer decides or intuits that

a particular genre is called for in the situation, he or she takes up the genre and uses it to frame a

written response to the situation.”2 So, in preparation for writing the interview transcript, I read

through the article thoroughly and chose different parts of the article that fit well in an interview

setting. And from there, I was able to formulate questions that were applicable to the information

I wanted to include in the author’s answers. In high school, I participated in writing articles for

my school newspaper, which included a lot of interviewing in order to write the article; this

information that I learned through that experience was able to help me format my questions, and

format the whole interview transcript in general, which was especially helpful.

Many different techniques were used during the actual writing of the answers in the mock

interview. An important factor of translating genres is considering the audience, and I struggled a

little to recognize what the audience for my interview transcript would be. Directly, the audience

would be the group of workers that were going to use Wilson’s information to write and inform

college students interested in internships. The study of rhetoric during this course helped me

greatly when trying to develop a style for the interview. When Doug Downs discusses the five

canons of rhetorical composition, he describes style as, “crafting the particular expressions of

2
Lisa Bickmore. “Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre within Rhetorical (Eco)Systems.”
Open English SLCC, Open English, 2016.

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your material to make it best suit the ecology… they have to decide the best words and sentence

patterns to use to express their ideas and voices.”3 Considering this, I developed a more casual

style of writing because I was trying to incorporate a style that would be able to resonate with

college students. Also, while writing Wilson’s answers, I wanted to incorporate the style of

writing that I noticed in the article. However, with making the interview more casual, I did not

include the research details of his experiment. Another reason for omitting many statistics from

his research was that it was not crucial to the main theme of the mock interview. While writing

his answers, I actually got to imagine myself asking these questions in a room with Wilson, and

got to picture how he would respond to a question of such content. It was very helpful to use my

imagination and create an idea of who the author was in my head based on his writing. I also

enjoyed adding my own effect on the interview, by being able to respond in the answers to the

questions, and use my creativity to come up with an outside situation of why the interview was

taking place in the first place. I was grateful that I got to add a little bit of my own touch to the

project, while still portraying the information in an appropriate way.

I faced many challenges during the process of translating an academic article into a

different genre. One of the challenges was being able to translate the author’s opinion on the

topic of accounting internships smoothly. Although I was able to grasp a firm idea of his opinion,

I had to incorporate some of my own abstract ideas in the process, which was challenging.

However, it is now known to me that this process is acceptable, and Karen Rosenberg talks about

it, saying, “When thinking about the writer, we are particularly interested in clues about the

writer’s motivation and agenda. If we know something about what the writer cares about and is

trying to accomplish, it can help orient us to the reading and understand some of the choices the

3
Doug Downs, “Rhetoric: Making Sense of Human interaction and Meaning-Making.” Writing about writing, Vol.
4, 2020, 794.

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writer makes in his or her work.”4 This information presented has the ability to be very powerful,

and developing a skill similar to this can help further develop an understanding of authors and

pieces of work in an extreme way. Rosenberg is trying to emphasize the potential power that you

may have as a writer if you are able to understand the intentions of the author. This information

has been extremely helpful for me for the duration of this course to overcome many challenges I

have faced. Most of the content of the article is also centered around his research and his

research results, but when writing the interview I did not want to focus on his research, but rather

on what I gathered to be the main ideas of the article. When analyzing my project, I recognize

that some may disagree and have contradicting ideas of the bias that I noticed in the article.

Some may perceive the author differently, and therefore disagree with my interview answers that

I formulated with the information I was given. Also, some may have contradicting opinions of

the glorious review of accounting internships.

With the incorporation of many helpful resources, this project brought many new and

important aspects of writing that I have not yet considered in my writing journey. Although it

was challenging and something new, it compelled me to use my creativity and new features of

writing that will be essentially helpful for my future. With the use of these aspects of writing, I

was able to enjoy writing in a different way than accustomed to. I am now more equipped to

understand the power and the use of genres in everyday life, as well as in writing.

4
Karen Rosenberg, “Reading Games: Strategy for Reading Scholarly Sources.” Writing Spaces: Readings on
Writing, Vol. 2, 2011, 212.

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Bibliography
Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Like A Writer.” Readings on Writing, Writing Spaces, 2011, 71-86.

Bickmore, Lisa. “Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre within Rhetorical (Eco)Systems.”
Open English SLCC, Open English @ SLCC, 1 Aug. 2016,
https://pressbooks.pub/openenglishatslcc/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-genre-
within-rhetorical-ecosystems/.
Downs, Doug. “Rhetoric: Making Sense of Human interaction and Meaning-Making.” Writing
about writing, Vol. 4, 2020, 794.
Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategy for Reading Scholarly Sources.” Writing Spaces:
Readings on Writing, Vol. 2, 2011.