Author: huynh.ta

The schema was helpful to my writing. The cover letter was short, but seeing how the sections were organized along with the samples helped me sort my thoughts. It was appropriate for the rhetorical situation.

The last sentence of my first paragraph may not fit in the <proposition> tag. I wanted to emphasize my enthusiasm in joining the company rather than saying that I have the necessary skills since I felt that that’s explained throughout.

I accidentally excluded certain tags (<accomplishment>, <skill>, etc.) from the schema because I had overlooked them, but inserting them after finishing my draft didn’t bother me.

I want to add a “site” attribute to the <contact_info> tag. That would help for displaying portfolios. I also would like to add an <interests> tag that works like <programs>, <accomplishments> and <skills> because that feels like an important point that doesn’t entirely fit in those three categories. Additionally, it would be nice if the <proposition> tag included something else to the description to suggest an enthused statement to join (see my mention above about this) or a separate tag with attributes of “proposition” or the other. That’s just a suggestion from when I was writing though. It may be too specific. Other than that, I noticed there’s no place for an actual signature, which is typical of cover letters.

I like this genre and schema. It was clear and nice to follow. I kept putting off writing a cover letter because it intimidated me, but I’m really glad that I got to do this. The sample one was easy to follow and work from.

Edutainment blogging was a cool genre, but it was very fuzzy and difficult to work with. My second project was heavily image based, so I had to worry a lot about display. Thus, this genre was a very nice change of pace since it was short and all text. It also targeted a narrower audience. Not authoring the schema allowed me to focus on my piece rather than on structural or display problems.

Edutainment blogging was a fun genre, but it was also very painful to write. I found myself going over the limit since I had to find a way to break down the material in a way that was entertaining without taking away from the content. Additionally, making visuals took longer than expected. I ended up excluding some parts because putting it all together was a lot of work. It’s a little upsetting since I was planning to incorporate gifs on the steps to make the algorithms easier to follow. Instead, what you see is a really long post with separate visuals for the steps (at least the main ones). It was also hard to style. Lists in lists didn’t auto indent, so I ended up adding some hyphens to let readers see what were sublists. Another problem was that I ended up mixing in the HTML <hr> tag, but it didn’t render that way. That’s fine, but having to manage these small bumps takes time away from writing the actual content. XML was difficult to work with for this project since I used a lot of visuals. It doesn’t make as much sense to read the XML version since the pictures are integral to the whole piece. It probably would have been better if I separated my post into different parts, but I really wanted to research something new. Overall, it was a cool genre to explore, but I think it’ll be more effective to target a more specific topic and audience next time.

Any of the three other genres would be helpful to me. The cover letter is appealing because I’m graduating next year, and I need to start applying to jobs for then (also it would be a nice change from how long the blog post takes.). But I’m also interested in the proposal. I’ve been framing my writing around my interests in game development, so it’d be cool to come up with a proposal of how we can integrate them in school. There’s a lot of thought that goes into the idea though. Games are fun when we willingly play them but introducing them in a forced way might destroy their effectiveness. I won’t have enough time to research that topic in depth for this project, but I’ll keep it in mind for the next few days.

The feasibility report would also be good to review. My capstone team and I constructed a bit of one for our project. I’m not too interested in creating one right now for any personal projects though since creating a project proposal would be more beneficial starting out.

I’ll dissect the cover letter for now. The schema for it is stricter than my team’s edutainment blogging. Almost every line is given a tag, and it has a clear start and end. How I see myself writing this following this outline is by opening with the company and position that I’m interested in applying to. Then, I explain why I am interested and why I would be a good fit broadly. That ends the introduction. Next, I move into the main section where I go in depth with my experience relating to the position. This can be work experience or my education. Finally, I close reiterating my strong points (not necessarily experience but working style whether in groups or individually) and thank them. Following that is the salutation. Overall, I like the structure and will probably be reviewing this genre.

The introduction and roadmap tags were helpful guides. Overall though, the schema restricted my writing. I wanted to build up step by step to the A* algorithm by introducing the two algorithms that it is a combination of. However, I noticed that some parts fit better nestled rather than mandatory and separate. For example, I thought that a section discussing one algorithm fit in the explanation tag, but in that section I also wanted to include the question_relative_topic tag. Sometimes learning works better like this rather than when a subtopic is introduced before hand so that the learner sees how it ties into the broad picture. On another note, algorithms rely on a lot of iteration, so it would be good to include an instruction portion to the schema (like steps).

Typically, my topic assumes that the reader has some experience with programming, but I tried to break it down for even a general audience. A problem I had was deciding which terms to use. For example, I referred to tiles and nodes, interchangeably. Tile was specific to the situation I was discussing but node is the common term. I wanted to use node after introducing the tile as one so that if they decide to research more in depth, they would be able to follow without having to refer back for clarification. Another major problem I had was trying to keep the reader interested by using comparisons and images without losing what I wanted them to take away. (Try not to read it before I finish though? Otherwise, you’ll just be really confused…)

Oliver’s paper fit much better with the schema. He used the optional important_idea to support his topic, which I can incorporate into mine. After reading his, I do see how some of the sections I were unsure of fit in with our tags.

Making the schema for academic blogging was pretty different from making the first one as a class, mainly because this genre approaches writing in a very casual but informative way. Since it’s casual, the layout of one blog post can vary greatly from another’s, which made it difficult to gather commonalities without taking away from the pieces.

Our genre can be broadly categorized as edutainment, education with an entertaining twist. The genre includes a variety of mediums, such as texts with referenced images, comics, and video blogs. Since it is a conglomeration, it takes from academic genres (textbooks, journals, interviews, etc.) and presents them in a conversational manner. The following are examples of the genre: TED Talks, xkcd: What If, Computation Fairytales, the Cartoon Guide series, and the Manga Guide series.

Let’s take a look at two in the lists: Computational Fairytales and the Cartoon Guide series. The former introduces basic programming concepts through a collection of narratives. It first lays out the story for each chapter, and then presents the problem (loops, Big O notation, algorithms, etc.) with images to clarify the comparison. For example, it introduces Djikstra’s algorithm, a shortest path algorithm, by having the protagonist help a village find the most efficient emergency route. The village is divided into sections, representing the nodes in a graph, and connected by bridges, representing edges between nodes. Throughout, the reader is placed in the main character’s perspective: the reader learns the concepts as the protagonist learns or presents them.

The Cartoon Guide series takes another approach to the genre by presenting information in comic format. The books themselves do not have a concrete storyline, rather the characters act as a guide, occasionally making humorous commentary and references to make the text more entertaining.

Edutainment is a great learning tool, as it appeals to a wide audience from children, who are still learning basic necessities (language, calculations, etc.) to adults who are simply interested in new ways of learning. Certain items in the category may be intended for a particular demographic, but overall, they are for broad consumption.

The genre is a response to typical education techniques. It tries to engage its users to maintain their attention. It is not internal to an organization or field; it is created by those with backgrounds in the targeted subject or by a group of people focusing on different aspects of the composition (scientists, writers, artists, etc.). Additionally, it can prompt other genres, such as critiques, student essays/responses (like this one), and scientific studies (on its process and effect); and even inspire other genres, or subgenres, such as educational video games.

To form our schema, we can review examples of works in our genre and sort out their commonalities. Edutainment is broad, but perhaps the layout can include small sections with brief explanations of the topic and then relatable comparisons accompanied by images. We may also find it helpful to speak to the people who create in the genre. Another idea is to inspect the parent works that make up our genre first.

I co-oped at two different places:  Novartis, a pharmaceutical company, and ChoiceStream, an online ad company. I did web development on internal applications for both.

At Novartis, I worked on a few applications for creating and managing samples for the oncology department. I don’t have a good biology background, so the technical jargon was a challenge. The development team was casual, but there was some overhead with planning meetings, getting approvals, and establishing a good base design down before development. This is reasonable though as its a multinational company and a lot of people rely on the integrity of the data. My mentor here was more of a scientist beginning but over the years he drifted into software development. A few of the other co-ops’ majors here were CS/Biology, Bioinformatics, and Math/CS. Overall, my experience here was wonderful! I still keep in touch, but I’d like to explore my interests.

ChoiceStream was smaller and more casual, and they had the incredible snack shelf and Bagel Fridays! A lot more goes into ad placement than I’d known (like how some of their developers use AdBlock! Gasp, their products worked too well!). I worked on some applications to track and generate ad campaigns here. I did a bit of automation with a tool called Chef, which had a bunch of cooking references for sub or related technologies (Cookbooks, Recipes, Kitchen, Knife, etc). Just pointing that out since many technologies today use common words in other fields for naming. In a way it’s helpful because the comparisons relate to the task, but it can also get confusing. It makes it sounds like I can cook, but really, I can’t.

In the workforce, you need to be able to communicate with a variety of people: other developers; management lead; users, whether they are scientists or ad operations; and HR. My main problem is my anxiety. It makes it difficult for me to ask for clarification, which is vital in tech, or really any field, where disciplines intersect. I also tend to have a soft voice with those I’m unfamiliar with. My supervisor joked about creating a curriculum to remedy that. It started off with, “Yell as loud as you can at standup!” Anyway, sorry to my group in advance!

I need to really think about what I want to do after I graduate (in…9 months? Oh, dear…). I’d like to get into game development to help people though, so I joined the ReGame VR Lab after researching for the first writing assignment. I’m starting off simple first, but so far, I really enjoy it!

The XML formatting was more restrictive than what I’m used to. I missed being able to add certain characteristics that weren’t built into our schema (italics, bold, etc.). That slowed my writing down to a crawl, but overall, it was an interesting way to organize thoughts. Paired tags made it easy to locate material and view metadata (like number of authors and revision number). It ties in well with version control too. I like that we had our own associated document, so I could just update mine and not accidentally break others’ documents (like I did on co-op). I’ve only used Git for tracking code, but I could see myself using it more for creative/technical writing, especially for stories to see how they change overtime (and cringe at how they started out…).

I didn’t like that the schema was set so that the background tag was required before the summary (and other related positional constraints) because sometimes I prefer to give a brief description tied to the summary first and then lead into the source. Sometimes variety makes a more interesting read. Viewing XML, at least in the process of writing it, wasn’t as clear-cut as just using a regular word processor. For example, I kept clicking the indent button so that my text wouldn’t run off screen. Hmm, I’m sure there’s a way to set that though. I don’t mind using Oxygen for future assignments; I’m just more familiar writing differently, so it’ll just take a bit of time to learn shortcuts to create a steady workflow.

On a related note, annotated bibliographies provide a good reference for both the composer and others to review sources and see how they relate to current projects. With that in mind, structuring it with XML makes it easy for others to get a sense of our thought. It’s especially useful for peer reviewing later since our different concentrations shape how we write.