Old Words in New Orders: Multigenre Essays in the Composition Classroom

Multigenre essays should be made more available to students in all disci­plines, especially to students in freshman composition classes. By multigenre essays I mean essays that include creative elements such as lists, letters, and interviews, in addition to traditional academic prose. By combining creative elements with academic prose I propose that writers will be able to express more of what they want to say in an essay by using both analytical and associative ways of thinking. The benefits of having students write multigenre essays are three-fold: 1) when students are given the option of including such things as dialogs, poems, and vignettes in addition to standard academic prose, they gain in rhetorical flexibility-experimenting with and finding the right genres and combination of genres that best fits what they want to say; 2) they also gain in their ability to take a more personal stance on an issue by having more options for positioning themselves in reference to a given topic; and 3) they gain in their ability to push at the perceived boundaries of a discourse.