Overall, I feel like this class not only made me a better writer, but it also improved my analytical skills. It has been making me think differently about everything I’ve been reading since we studied more about genre. Just a few days ago, I was reading a mystery book and I stopped in the middle to think about overlapping themes and structures that might be present in mystery books, and I caught myself trying to vaguely sketch out an XML schema in my head for that genre. Thinking back, I feel like finding structure in the assignments I’ve been writing in class has always been a subconscious thing I’ve done, but taking this class will make me think more consciously about extracting structure from examples I’m given. I believe that doing this will improve the quality of any sort of documents I have to write in the future.
Overall, I feel the structure of the class, where we would do the assignments in XML, submit using Github, and write design entries using WordPress all worked well. Having our work out in the open for the entire class to see was a little nerve wracking at first, but in the long run I learned how useful having my work peer reviewed could be. On top of that using a markup language such as XML also seemed like an extremely useful tool in teaching us about extracting structure from a genre.
Looking back at assignment 2, my initial thoughts when starting it were about how easy coming up with a schema for whatever genre we picked would be. In my mind, the structure of all genres was pretty straightforward, and apparently all of my group members thought so too, except their structure was different that mine. Going through and discussing how to format out schema, and coming to a single conclusion was an extremely interesting experience. Before starting the assignment, I thought it would be a piece of cake, but as we went through, I realized how much work it would be. After we wrote up a schema we could all agree on, I thought it was perfect and we would be done with it forever. However for assignment 3, a few of our classmates actually disagreed with some aspects of it, which I thought was interesting. Even though our individual compositions looked really similar, there were some differences between our schema, which I found very interesting. It seemed like we all subconsciously knew about the genre, but all defined it differently.
I feel like after going through this class, I won’t be able to pick up on different genres in workplaces or daily life without consciously looking at the structure. Although it might be a little more work on my part, overall I think it will help me better pick up on how to using those genres properly and effectively.
