Complaint Complexity
“You are probably already familiar with many genres, although
you may not know them as such; perhaps your knowledge of genres is limited to
types of books, whether mystery, horror, action, etc.”(Dirk, 250) However,
understanding genre is way more complex than given credit for, what most people
don’t know is anything that has writing on it can be a form of genre. The best
way to begin understanding genre is to get that all genres are classified by conventions,
patterns, or ingredients that reoccur in all of these specific type of writing.
I am determined to elaborate on how to break down the conventions on the
specific genre of sample complaint letters and what conventions make the genre significant.
Complaints can be written for more reasons than I can began to list -starts a
civil suit; the plaintiff's lawyer writes up a very brief description of the
events as his client claims them to be and files it with the court- though there
is specific characteristics that make this piece of writing stand apart from
the others. Although, this was a broad genre I emphatically made the choice to
show three prime examples-by doing this it allows me to break down simplify,
compare, and contrast- for the reader to visually see what my analysis is based
on.
I took a close look at 3 samples of how complaints should be formatted. When you read these particular pieces of writing by scanning them you can immediately see they all list the same conventions. The first thing you notice is the identification, address, and contact information of the person making the complaint is listed first before anything else. However, if you read like a writer you would know that this is so you know who is addressing you with a problem before you even read it. In this case both of these techniques serve the same purpose. After the person making the complaint information is listed is the person’s information that the complaint is against, with their job position, organization, and contact information. They are all formatted just a little differently but they all have the same information presented at the top of the page, when reading rhetorically I believe this appeals to logically because it is the first pieces of information needed to know dealing with anything in law.
Starting into the complaint section two of the complaint samples
that I used are more alike than the third. Ex.A and Ex.B are formatted in a
fill in the blank kind of way. Which might be more common and efficient, you
can just plug in the information that is relative to you. However, the
complaint section of Ex.C is in letter format. This is where little conventions
can be broken but it does not make it any less apart of this genre. These characteristics
are just some of the ways to classify this specific genre from another. Also,
taking different reading approaches on a piece of writing can be beneficial in
different ways depending on what type of genre you are reading.
Work Cited
Navigating Genres By; Kerry Dirk