ENTRY #7 Using Writing to Think About the Letter Genre

In preparation this week for our second genre presentation I read the Tompkins chapter 5 personal writing, which included both the genre journals and the genre letter writing. As I was reading I started to think about how these two genres might be confusing for students to differentiate. Journals should be more personal since when you write a journal you're the primary audience for that journal. A teacher might be reading it but it's for your own reflection. I would argue that grammar, and errors don't particularly matter, as Tompkins (2012) supports this idea as well, "Students journal writing is often spontaneous and loosely organized, and it contains more errors in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation than other types of writing because writers are more focused on ideas" (p.108). Letters should be a more formal type of writing because your audience is very specific, you have a very specific purpose for writing that letter and they're going to be looking at how your writing physical looks "include the date, a greeting, the body and a closing" (Tompkins, p.117). I think that where the confusion could come from if it's not explicitly taught correctly, would be that they're both a type of personal writing. Thinking about this I think a mentor text could be used to compare the two different genre pieces of writing. 

One of the mentor texts I have actually chosen this week, "Dear Mr.Henshaw" by Beverly Clearly seems to combine the two types of genre writings together. I'm wondering if maybe this book could be used in classrooms for students to reflect on how Leigh's (the main character) writing to Mr.Henshaw fits the letter genre and look at the differences when it switches to Leigh just writing a letter as a journal and not sending it. I think I would introduce this book/read the book before I want the students to send a letter to there own author, it can be a great way to talk about what the letter should look like and some ways that Leigh's letter writing doesn't fit how we should write to an author. For example the format of the letter writing matches Tompkins description of date, greeting, body and closing. A way it's more like a journal is Leigh's word choice such as using words like "dumb" (Clearly, p.14), and "mediumest"(Clearly, p.15). I really think that this book could bring about great conversations/discussion about writing a letter and journal writing to help students see the differences. I'd be curious to look into Beverly Clearly thought process when writing Dear Mr.Henshaw, to see if she purposefully combined the two genres of writing. 

References 

Cleary, Beverly. (1983). Dear Mr. Henshaw. New York: W. Morrow