PB1B- Genre Generator

There are three genre generators that we used to find some fixed conventions. One created scientific articles, the other one created comical cartoons, and the last one created memes. Each outcome of those three genre generators had some similarities and differences of conventions when compared with each other. First, we we’ll talk about some similarities of genres that those three genre generators generated. They all serve main purpose of entertaining people rather than informing. The audience can be anyone who is looking for an amusement rather than thought provoking effects. All three had no specific message that author was trying to give us.

Now we need to explore each genre and see how they have different conventions to one another. First genre generator created random scientific articles. The articles that this SCIgen created provide visual literacies like graphs, charts, and figures. This visualization makes this genre look professional as a scientific article. Although it seems like a professional scientific theory, when readers read carefully into each sentence, they will be saying, “These all don’t make sense!” It has context-free grammar with wordings that are very challenging. Each sentence has arduous words like, “panacea”, “Boolean logic”, and “quandary.” Additionally, this formal format of scientific article is almost unapproachable looking. Also this article that’s been generated is very well structured and organized. It includes table of contents so the readers can see information that they are looking for. Those well structure article makes it look more formal as if it is from Wikipedia website. The contents are different too. The contents in SCIgen’s generator are scientific that talks about algorithms and archetypes. The length of genre created stands out of all three generated genres because it is definitely longer than other two comics and memes.

Second genre that comic generator created had very opposing conventions from SCIgen generator’s genres. It is first of all short and concise. SCIgen have long and formal format whereas this comics that were generated have short three scenes of cartoons and very informal format. The cartoon had profanity in it. For example, one scene had a guy saying “Ef the police,” or “I efed your sister,” or even shooting the other character in the scene. Each scene is very unprofessionally written, drawn, and poorly described. Also, each scene of this comic was reused every now and then, giving random scenes that readers cannot understand. Comparing to SCIgen articles, these comics have easy vocabularies that did not require readers to think deeply. The contents have intention to be witty and funny to the readers. Also the length of this comic is very short; it only has one quote per scene.

The last but not least generator that I experimented was called memes generator. Memes are very easy to find nowadays on social medias. It often has a funny picture with caption that goes along with the picture. It brings laugh from the audiences when the picture is making the right image of what caption is trying to say. This genre generator can actually have a lot of different conventions within memes because people can create their own memes. People can upload their own picture and caption it with whatever they want. The content of this genre is also for an amusement, just like comic generator. The word choices are boundary-less; whoever created the memes can say whatever they want. However, there are fewer profanities in memes than comic generator. Memes are fairly short that readers can stop scrolling for a second, laugh, and then go on.

Three of those genre generators provided how scientific article, comic, and memes should look like. We now have understanding of each genre because SCIgen, which generates scientific articles, provided scientific figures and charts. Comic generator provided cartoons or pictures and meme generator provided a picture with humorous captions. By identifying some distinct conventions in each genre generators provide, we can now identify a genre. And by identifying genre, we can analyze the genre. And when we are able to identify and analyze a genre, we can transform a genre into a new genre by applying our own conventions. Therefore, thinking about genre helps us to determine/ find convention within each genre. Knowing convention within genre can assist us to have not only better understanding of genre but also better understanding of author’s purpose. 

Extra random plot generator: http://www.plot-generator.org.uk

(It is UK website, but it generates random plots. Pretty cool)