Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
par. 3 "the ways in which texts can be seen to differ from or be similar to one another are extremely complex. biber...has used computer analysis of large corpora to demonstrate that different types of text vary from one another along numerous independent dimensions, creating a very large number of different text types. thus...we might find that 'formal' texts are marked by features such as frequent use of passive forms and nominalizations, and that 'informal' texts display frequent use of personal pronouns and contractions. however, there are genres in which texts typically display high levels of all these four features and others that display low levels of use of all of them." <--the terms are too broad

par. 5 "for any genre, a range of text types may be appropriate, but the range is far from infinite, and an error in setting the paramters in the multiple dimensions along which a text type may vary can result in the creation of an inappropriate text type"; example: in english beginning a letter "dear" is acceptable in a much broader array of contexts than beginning it "darling," but the words *mean* almost the same thing removed from genre-specific contexts.

par. 6 "failure to implement generic factors adequately may result in giving the impression to a reader that the writer is, perhaps, uneducated, weak, unenthusiastic, or deliberately insulting....this is precisely because the concept of genre is involved with factors such as writer/reader relationships and text purpose. a text that sends the wrong generic signals may...suggest that the writeris attempting to claim too close a relationship with the reader, or is being too distant. generic errors result in misinterpretation not so much of core meaning as of attitudes."

par. 8-10 if students need to excell at one particular genre, studying its features closely in isolation may be situationally good/necessary, but in general this is "of limited value" if not outright bad practice (agreeing w/freedman); (but in disagreement) "for improving general writing skills, teaching general principles on how genre-related factors relate to the internal features of a text is likely to be more effective than teaching specific features associated with individual genres."

par. 12 he favors a broader approach: "limiting reading to texts we think our students should be able to write at the present time is restricting. it is also important to realize that the genre of a text is recognizable not only by its internal features, but by the features of other genres that it does not have; genres are in part defined and identified contrastively."

par. 13 "we cannot expect students to be able to write texts of even just one or two genres successfully if they have never attempted to go beyond these to establish precisely where the boundaries lie between one genre and another. furthermore, not only is it interesting and enjoyable to experiment with other kinds of text than those one expects to write, but all such work increases awareness of the importance of the various factors related to genre"

par. 14 & 15--> "text transformation tasks" = not-necessarily linearly "(a) reading and understanding the source text, (b) noting the genre of the source text, including identification of the reader/writer relationship and text purpose, (c) noting the results of generic factors on the content, organization, and language of the source text, (d) identifying the genre of the new text, and deciding on how generic factors will affect content, organization and language of the new text, (e) selecting relevant material from the source text, and (f) using this material to write the new text, taking into account the decisions made about appropriate content, organization and language"

par. 18 (rationale): "this old teaching idea fits in perfectly with the modern interest in genre, since it makes explicit both differences between genres and the way that all texts are related to audience, purpose and medium"

benefits:
par. 19 requires "careful examination of a source text" for both meaning and features making it situationally suitable
par. 20 puts "a number of constraints" on students' writing, which both provides content that some students (esp. L2) struggle with & gets in the way of examining features & keeps "less ambitious students" from being "able to recycle language they can handle easily, without necessarily venturing into more challenging territory"
par. 22 "engages the entire class in solving the same communicative problem"--"the interest for students in seeing texts written by other members of the class lies in seeing not so much what other people said, but how theys said it"
par. 23 "a futher advantage of giving the same communicative problem for everyone to solve is that it makes collaborative writing in pairs, or even threes, much more practicable. occasional collaborative writing is interesting and potentially useful, in that it can get students to explain to each other their reasons for wanting to write something in a particular way[, which] will again increase awareness of what they are doing and the decisions they are making as they write." [so here "collaborative writing" really mean "collaborative learning" but in a writing context?]
par. 24 "writers are encouraged to move away from the lower order skills of knowledge telling and towards the higher order skills involved in knowledge transforming" (<--bereiter & scardamalia)
par. 25 "by focusing on the communicative factors associated with genre, students become more aware of writing as a process of problem solving. they learn what questions they have to ask themselves in order to create appropriate writing, and they begin to learn how to respond to the answers at which they arrive. in particular, they learn that there are many different ways of communicating the same message, and that choice of language and text organization to communicate their message depends to a large extent on audience, communicative purpose and generic convention."
par. 26 as an added bonus, seeing so many students' efforts to do the same writing task--"variations on a theme"--helps teachers better understand the task & how to talk about it.

disadvantages
par. 33 "they can be overused"
par. 34 "students are not required to express their own ideas"
par. 35 what they're doing is an "incomplete" or "unbalanced" writing task--not realistic writing
par. 37 "artificiality" of contexts created for assignments
par. 38 finding/creating matierials is a pain.