For writing project 2, my group chose a feasibility report as our genre. The schema was very useful for my writing process. Our schema was very structured, and it contained all of the necessary elements of a feasibility report. I think that the schema helped me write the feasibility report because it reminded me what types of information I needed to include. Since a feasibility report is very factual and technical, I did not feel like the structured schema limited my writing (unlike the annotated bibliography in project 1). I do not think that writing in xml was difficult for this project since all of my writing clearly fit into the different elements of the schema. However, I think it can be difficult for less technical writing when I want my ideas and sentences to be less fragmented and simple. The most helpful reading for project 2 was Seth’s feasibility report that he had written in a previous class. It was useful because it was short enough to identify its different elements, but complex enough to get a general understanding of a feasibility report. The group work was helpful for understanding writing since we all had to research the genre and combine our ideas into a broader, more coherent schema. I think that our group developed a comprehensive schema, and I think that I was able to successfully use it to create a complete feasibility report. I think that some of the research for my individual project (the feasibility of one company’s solar roadway panels) was difficult because there were not too many articles about the technical features of the panels.
