As I was finishing WP2 I had the realization that it hadn’t been the schema that drove my writing process, but the writing process that drove the schema. I believe this was understandable for the first portion of the writing assignment — at which point we were evaluating our schema and making changes in accordance with how an example of the genre might look — however during the rewrite phase I think it might have been more appropriate for me to consider other approaches to my structure.
While I’m not immediately convinced that there exists an obvious way in which to improve my approach in relation to our final schema, this thought was highlighted during my final round of edits. I found that the changes we made for the ‘specific_topic’ and ‘explanation’ tags caused slight issues due to their ordering requirements with respect to the ‘technical_principle’ tag. Due to list type nature of my ‘answer’ section, the ‘answer’ section does not flow in a natural way, but it is intentionally divided therefore making the section feel less “spacious” than if I were to have it undivided. It felt natural that each of the topics within the list deserved their own ‘specific_topic’, however this necessitated that I find a way to include ‘technical_detail’ in a limited amount of space before the start of the ‘specific_topic’ list.
Although I wouldn’t claim that I actively sought out and applied analysis tools brought forth during the required readings, if there were one that might apply to my approach it would be the discourse community. The nature of blogs puts the community appeal, tone and discourse in the front seat, making you very aware of your audience while writing the blog.
In conjunction with the class material, I felt the group project offered a very useful mechanism for developing an understanding of the genre. While there were benefits of collaborative group effort in dividing workload to cover many different sources from a variety of mediums — the chief source of understanding for myself derived from a sense of added responsibility when working within a group. I find I’m much more comfortable with letting myself down than letting others down, and a consequence of this is that in group projects I do my best to be checked in and contributing at all times.
I really appreciated how open the prompt for the assignment was. By allowing us to choose a topic of interest, I found myself much more engaged in the material. Twofold, it allowed me to choose topics that I felt would benefit me outside of the class, increasing my investment in not only the structure and details of rhetoric, but in the substance as well.
If I *had* to change any part of this project, I think I might integrate the points made in the readings into our individual write ups. This could be something like a section of XML common in all projects covering topics, like <discourse_community>, <audience>, etc. These topics are covered in the design entries as well, however a direct analysis of our specific projects would be helpful in cementing the ideas.
