PB1B- le genre

Genre generators can be used for many things like simple entertainment, new ideas, or to find a common convention between a certain essay, or comic, or maybe even a meme. In class we have been learning about how important it is to learn conventions of a genre to help be more successful when writing. Using a research essay, comic, and meme generator we will be looking for the conventions that we were able to find in each generator.

The first generator I used was SciGen, a computer science research paper generator. With repetitive generations I was quick to see the common patterns and conventions that make up the paper. As I skimmed through the paper it was clear that the essay was very structured. There were titles to describe what exactly they would talk about like introduction, models, related works, and conclusions. These at first glance already served to make up a convention- that SciGen research essays are very structured and make each section easy to find. As I began reading multiple generated essays I was able to notice that in the generation it was found necessary to have an informational title that is able to describe the work as a whole using one phrase. A section called the “abstract” then follows the title and essentially states a brief claim that will be defended and proved throughout the essay. As the essay tries to prove a point, the rhetoric is clearly that of a first draft paper maintaining a formal tone and using vocabulary that at least seems to sound and look smart (because I do not know what half the words mean).  To sum up some of conventions included in the Computer Science papers that were generated are titled paragraphs, a clear and informational title, formal tone, models and graphs to go along with the results, and a conclusion.

            Pandyland was much different than SciGen because it was a comic generator and so the conventions of course were much different. As I was looking at the different comics that it was creating there was one thing that was very clear each comic used very casual language and even sometimes used profanity and slang. This convention allows for comics to use a type of comedy like black humor. Another convention that was used was dialogue and so it was easier to make a joke through dialogue because the character often set him up at the beginning to be funny at the end. Besides this comics ranged in conventions as they talked about different things like politics, sex, social media, or just random topics.

            The third generator was a meme generator, which is typically a picture from a movie, book, show, or some other entertainment showing for example someone making a very clear facial expression that is then used to describe different situations in which someone would make that exact face. Of course we know that even though there could be hundreds of conventions in a genre not all have to be used in each piece. In memes we found different conventions used for different memes. One convention would be the use of two phrases. For example there is a picture of a baby holding his fist up almost in celebration and the top phrase reads “only went to first class, midterm, and final” and the bottom phrase read “still got an A”. Most memes are set up this way in which there is a phrase and then the image and then the last phrase. It is set up this way because the order in which someone usually looks at a picture is up to down. Another convention that was used was the use of images. The images themselves almost all came from a very popular source like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Game of Thrones, NBA games, Rap Concerts, or a normal person making a name for them by taking a super funny picture.

            In essence, each genre generator consisted of conventions that consistently came up. The reason why they consistently came up because these generators realized that to make something fit successfully in a genre SOME conventions need to be included. However, we also did see how there were some comics and memes that took it upon themselves to be unique and did not use as much conventions often making up their on scheme for a meme or comic.