Imagine your mind as a garden. When you read, you are enriching the soil, which allows your crops to become more bountiful and of a higher quality. The crop you are yielding is writing of your own that can be used to nourish someone else’s garden. Through reading from a variety of gardens, you can diversify the content of your soil and grow increasingly beautiful and more interesting crops. On the contrary, if you spend all your time in one garden your plants may grow stagnant and poisoned through biomagnification of a singular style of content or a radical idea. This complicated concept of consuming and producing texts as a web of roots growing off of one another is what Kevin Roozen describes in his piece “Texts Get Their Meaning From Other Texts”.
After this baseline concept has been recognized, we can begin to understand disciplinarity and genre. The modern perception of genre is much more simple than the reality. As Neil Lerner describes in “Writing is a Way of Enacting Disciplinarity”, “writers are readers come to writing in their disciplines with histories, intentions, and expectation, all shaping the disciplines themselves and, in turn, shaping the writing that members of thus disciplines do.” Just as writers shape one another, they also shape genre and discipline. By playing with the boundaries of genre and discipline, writers, therefore, change the shape and what fits inside. Amy J Devitt describes it as a “response guided by past responses” in her piece “Generalizing About Genre: New Concetion of an Old Concept.” These notions emphasize the fluidity of genre while emphasizing the importance of community.
A concern that arises concerning this emphasized importance on community is exclusivity. When a genre is formed, and writers/ readers begin to feed off of one another, a set of disciplinary terms or jargon becomes baseline knowledge in the community. As the discipline grows, this predetermined field of knowledge expands, and it becomes more and more difficult for newcomers to join or understand the nuances of the field. That being said, in order to improve the success of your garden and your discipline, make sure your plants are inclusive.
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