Over the course of this semester, I don’t think that the way I write has changed much, but the way I approach an assignment definitely has. Using XML and defining a genre model before each project forced me to think about how I generally wanted to structure and organize whatever it is that I am writing. It was tedious to have to come up with conventions of each genre and define the purposes and uses of each “element” in the genre, but it made me approach every project as a problem with a very formulaic answer that I had to put together. I liked thinking of it that way because it broke down every piece of writing into a bunch of much smaller tasks and elements. This made writing a lot less opened ended, and thus a lot less of a chore.
I was pretty resistant to using XML while I was writing for the first part of the semester, and rather than writing in oxygen, I would write out a draft of my project in notepad and then copy and paste the relevant parts into the XML document. My genre analysis was still relevant while I was doing this, but it made it so that I wasn’t exactly addressing each element in the genre model. For project three I really tried to write to the genre model. It was nice because once the genre model was together, I could skip around and fill in elements with the information that I wanted to include. I didn’t have to write in order and it was much easier to step away from my writing and come back to it later because I didn’t have to remember my train of thought from before. It was kind of a pain to put together a genre model that would work for everyone during project 2, but having the genre model for project three was definitely worthwhile.
My only complaint was that writing in XML was a little clumsy. It was hard to keep things formatted and make sure my writing flowed. It would have probably made it easier if I could have made changes to the XML and then review my changes on a formatted version of it right away. Learning how to work with oxygen and GitHub was also kind of a necessary evil. I know most people don’t use GitHub that way, so it’s probably not super relevant knowledge for the future, but I was happy not to have to work through a terminal, because I didn’t want to worry about learning that this summer too. It wasn’t especially difficult to use GitHub or Oxygen, but it would have made it a lot easier to know how to use them well I think.
Seeing the connection between projects two and three was actually kind of cool. It was tedious but still informative to have to put together a genre model in project two, but it was interesting to have to write to a different genre model (that I didn’t make up) in project 3. I felt like project two was done with a real purpose because we used the genre models in project three. I also got to understand how helpful having a genre model to write to could be while writing project 3. While I really like the flexibility in choosing our own genres, I wish I had written a genre for project three that a schema would have been more valuable to have. Proposals are a really wide genre and the schema was helpful, but still had to be very open ended within each of the elements. So while I still saw the value in having the genre model, a proposal probably wouldn’t have been that much harder to write without the genre model.
I’ve learned about rhetorical analysis and genre in a bunch of different english classes before, but having to define it so strictly for each project in this class made me realize the benefit of analyzing a rhetorical situation as part of the writing process. I think it would benefit me a lot to consider the conventions of any genre that I communicate through a little more thoroughly than I did before. With luck, I won’t be writing that much in my future, most of anything I write will be to communicate directly with someone. So it’s going to be really important for me to consider what the uptake is for anyone reading what I write and that is worth putting some extra effort into thinking about.
