Guillaume de Machaut's "Voir Dit" is a dit amoureux that blends autobiography, lyric poems, and narrative prose in an innovative hybrid form, telling the story of the aging poet's love for a young woman through an elaborate mixture of genres; Rutebeuf's "Dit de Rutebeuf" uses the dit form for apparently autobiographical complaint, lamenting poverty, illness, and bad luck in a persona that may be literary construction as much as personal confession; Christine de Pizan's dits moraux use the genre for didactic and ethical instruction, showing how the dit's freedom from musical setting allowed women writers to enter literary production in domains denied to chanson composers who required court musical performance; A student writing a modern dit might compose a free-verse narrative poem of forty to sixty lines on a personal or social subject, using the dit's combination of narrative and reflection to explore a topic that doesn't fit neatly into either pure lyric or pure story; The dit's freedom from melodic constraint represents a crucial moment in the emergence of poetry as a written rather than performed art: when poetry no longer needed a melody, it could develop in directions that purely oral performance traditions could not accommodate; The distinction between the dit and the chanson, both medieval verse forms but one sung and one recited, reveals how fundamentally the medium of performance shapes the formal possibilities available to a medieval poet.