Inspecting Genre Generators

Every genre of written material has it’s own set of conventions, (otherwise it wouldn’t be considered a genre).  This applies not only to novels, but also to the three things that are being explored in this project builder which are scientific papers, comics, and memes.

            Everybody knows that scientific papers are extremely difficult to write.  Lot’s of research must go into creating one, and they are often not approved to be published.  However, this does not mean that scientific papers don’t have their own set of conventions that can be used to create a scientific paper on the spot.  Though, it must be noted that the research that goes into these papers can’t be created quite so easily.  One convention that scientific papers have is that they are rigidly structured.  Each paper has an abstract paragraph, which gives some insight into the topic at hand.  Then the paper has an introduction, which explains what the paper is researching.  The paper then describes what research or experiments were conducted and follows this with results.  Finally, the paper has a concluding paragraph, which interprets the data.  Another convention that scientific papers have is that they give citations for everything that is taken from other works.  Scientific papers also contain many graphs, which clarify data through visual representations.  Overall, scientific papers are hard to write, but, due to their abundance of conventions, easy to mimic.

            Humor is something that some people have and some people don’t.  And one common way of distributing humor is through comics.  Yet, comics have so many conventions to them that even a computer can use them and create a comic that can be quite humorous.  Some conventions for comics is that they all have drawings and words.  This way, comics can tell a joke and visually represent it at the same time.  This is helpful because comics tell jokes, which can be hard to understand without a picture accompanying them.  Comics are also broken up into scenes, with each scene in it’s own box.  The illustration styles in comics vary, but they all are not very detailed and not too realistic.  Each comic follows a set of characters, and usually has a main character who is in just about every comic strip at least once.  The comic generator also revealed that just like essays, comics have a structure to them.  They start with a question or insight that something is about to happen.  Next, an action takes place.  And finally, the last square contains a punchline.  Even though the comic generator used was not very funny, once in a while the combination of the three squares made sense and was laughable.

            Memes are very popular on the internet these days.  They are easy to create and are usually meant to be funny.  Conventions of memes are that they contain words on the top and bottom.  The words are usually white with black outlines.  Memes also contain a picture, and there are a certain set of pictures that are used for memes.  Each picture has its own theme, which leads into the convention that memes all have a theme to them.  For example, the meme with the walking penguin always contains an unpopular opinion, and the meme with the bear always contains a confession.  Overall memes are easy to create for both humans and computers.

            Each of these websites takes a form of writing, and creates a piece of work by simply following the conventions of the genre.  These websites can clarify the conventions for the genres because they show many examples of the work very quickly.  Since a computer is creating the written material, each piece of work follows the conventions very strictly, which can help people understand genres.