Hello Readers,
When our professor told us to write a blog in our Astu class, the first thing that I thought about was the genre. In the first couple of classes we had, we discussed this and I realized that I was really fascinated by the idea and the true meaning of this specific word. I always thought it was a way of classification in art like literature or music.
When I left the classroom that day, I started to look around more carefully. While I was walking down the street, everything in my head about this word started to get clear. When we said the genre is a way of thinking, It didn’t make sense at first but then, I started to link it with the real world around me. Everything was a way of self-expression and the way people express themselves were highly interbedded with the culture around them. I remember the first time that I read “language is sensitive to situation”. In my case, the situation in this sentence was culture. When you are inside of your own culture, you do not realize this at all. For example, when I was in Turkey, I wasn’t paying attention to the different genres and how it was related to the environment that I’m living in. It wasn’t new to me and when you see things over and over again, you do not realize how fascinating it can be. I started to compare the genres that I see in Canada and the ones that I see in my own country. For example, advertisements were similar in the situation because the purpose of an ad is always the same in every country, but I realized that the form of the advertisements was very different than where I came from. Being Canadian was highly in the foreground and I could feel the nationalism in every advertisement that I watched.The words that were chosen and the structure of the sentences were supporting this idea.
(“I am Canadian” commercials, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up0i0G_y05A)
The formal forms were different too. When you were filling up your personal information like your date of birth, you were writing the month first.I am used to writing the day first so I had a confusion when I first saw this format. (M,DD,YY) Or on the highway, the signs that showed how much time it takes to arrive somewhere also showed what were the exciting things that you can do in that area. I found this very interesting as a new genre which I had never seen before and it was intrinsic to this country.
This was the first time that I was in Canada.The culture and the language was new to me. I started to look around more carefully. The more I look, the more I realized the small details. Even when I was ordering coffee, there was this unnamed way of doing things. You have to order in a specific way. Even ordering coffee had a rule and a situation behind. Can this be a genre too? I’m still not sure but thinking about it made me feel excited.
I understand that looking at different genre’s in a new country gives you a lot of hints about the way of living and about how some things work around that specific society. The name of our Cap was “ global citizen’s” The meaning for me was to have different perspectives and combining them for the purpose of being a part of something bigger than your own culture and personal identity. Maybe it sounds silly, but thinking genre made me realize I was inside of a pool of diversity and I realized this while looking details and searching for new genres around the country that I just moved in. I felt like I expended my way of thinking. It was an exciting experience for me and it still is.