Generalizing about Genres

Oh a day off, and it's glorious. Of course, I spent it polishing up my curriculum vitae so it hardly counts as a psychological break from work.And never really a break from thinking about writing.

Resume vs. CV
My resume is pretty well rounded, but my CV is disappointingly thin. I wish I'd gone to more conferences while in grad school, published more of my papers.

I was a single mom through grad school, and as a result life narrowed right down to only what was absolutely necessary: the kids and the requirements of school. Conferences, traveling, would have been extravagances I couldn't afford.

Still, I have managed to assemble a rudimentary CV that I will refine over the next few days. My deadline is the end of the month, but now during Spring Break, I have time to think about it.

Professional Wordsmithing  
I'm also struggling with how to translate a year in the marketing field into relevant academic experience. It absolutely was, but how to articulate that?

It's going to translate into the ability to teach how to write in the real world, write for money, to turn your wordsmithing into cash to support yourself. I'd like to find a way to offer that as a course in the English department.

Writing Across the Disciplines
While I was thinking about it, I went through all the course offerings in all the departments and discovered that so many disciplines offer courses in writing. Journalism, Communications, Special Programs, Business, even Engineering. I wonder why these departments don't recruit faculty from the writing department.

A New Genre: Historiography
Along the way, I also discovered a new genre, from the History Department: the historiography.. It's a "focused study on a particular theme, problem or issue from a specific era and field of history" and an assessment of the secondary literature on this topic. Basically, it is how historians assessing how other historians have written about history.

Blogging
Even blogging can be lucrative, though I am not particularly interested in changing the (self-indulgent) nature of the Bitten Apple. I looked today at the analytics of this blog and discovered that 53,000 sets of eyes have read it.That seems like a lot, though hundreds of those page views were probably my own to see how it looked.

While pondering that, I discovered the intriguing detail that readers of The Bitten Apple arrive here while searching for the following topics: Goth, sock monkeys, social exchange theory, Swedish Easter witches and pink Smith & Wessons. I wonder what they think when they arrive?

I can see getting here on the wings of social exchange theory, something I tend to belabor, but it's the strangest thing is that the Goth keyword would get readers here (rather than somewhere else). I've written about Goth exactly once, in "Goth RV Rodeos" (describing a strange dream I had about my neighbors).

And as for pink Smith & Wessons, that was in "Things I Wish I Had." You just never know what you'll write that many people will read.