CATEGORIZING YOUR WRITING

 

CATEGORIZING OUR WRITING.

We will be addressing an important writers issue today and that’s, ‘CATEGORIZING OUR WRITING’.

Remember, the parable of the wheat and the tars? Okay, how about the one that involves the separation of the goats and the sheep? We believe that one should ring a bell but if it doesn’t we’ve got you covered.

The theme behind both stories isn’t far fetched. They are stories that point to one thing and that’s separation.

Now, let’s relate it to writing, writing genres and categorizing our writing.

Let’s rant more about categorizing our writing into a renowned genre.

Most start-up writers get confused when asked to categorize their writing.

In fact, they think categorizing their writing into a renowned genre is some how limiting.

It’s easy to hold this point of view when we’re only starting out as writers, but as we progress, the narrative takes a U turn.

Firstly, what’s the whole buzz about genre?

It would be wise to begin there at least before zooming off to knowing which genre our writing should fall into.

A literary definition of genre sees the term as “the classification of literary works on the basis of their content, form, or technique”. This definition suggests that, in a literary setting, genre categorization is seen to occur after the writing process, rather than being an important consideration during text creation.

That is to say we don’t necessarily have to hang onto the picture of genre in our minds while we’re writing because a certain genre already lies at the heart of our writing. Genre, in wrap, should guide us and not overwhelm us.

It should paint a definite image to our readers when they read our works.

It should help them knot our writing to a similar piece that they’ve read and help them flow well with our writing.

Take Poetry for instance, it’s a genre that
focuses on creating imagery with words, using rhymes and other stylistic devices to create poems.

If a poet wishes to create poems, he doesn’t have to tell stories like prose. Though there are prose-poems but the beauty of poetry lies in the painting of pictures with words.

Haven said this, there are many types of genres in writing and they may not be far from major literary types, such as Comedy, Drama, Horror, Realism, Romance, Satire, Tragedy, Thriller, Fantasy etc

For professional writings, they can take forms like Book Reviews, Critiques, Letters, Journals, memoirs etc

Now that we’ve listed these examples of genre, we hope categorizing our writing into their appropriate genre won’t cause us much headache going forward.

Let’s do better with the separation of the goats from the sheep with our writings.

Blissful day.

Happy writing!