To start off, I would like to say that I definitely think about writing differently than when we started the course. My writing process has changed, and I will get into that, but also my role as an audience member has changed.
Looking first at how my writing process has changed, XML made me think about paragraphs as having a clear “intent”. Sometimes it was even smaller, with multiple sentences having their own “intent” and then combining that with another clump of sentences to form a larger idea. The way we communicated these intents were through the element names or “type” attribute. Looking back at project one we see this with the summary type. By identifying what the potential uptake of different parts of the citation (looking back at project 1 we had summary and relevance), the author can literally label their intention.
Now the question becomes how us as readers of the formatted document benefit from from these labels. Frankly, we may not directly see a benefit. We may only see the benefit through the author’s improved ability to clearly communicate an attempt by preemptively labeling their work. There is something to be said that a skilled can arguably do this already, but these labels certainly help some us. As readers of the XML, that we often were during our class, we can see the intent and this allows us to empathize with the author. It shows us the desired uptake quite literally.
Outside of XML and blatant rhetorical analysis my role as audience member and a consumer of many genre of writing, whether it is a youtube video (the finished product of a script) or a news article, has changed. Just the other day I was watching a video by a popular edutainment youtuber and noticed striking similarities to the genre we had made and used in class. Just watching the video once I saw clearly defined “technical principles” (only about 6) throughout the entire video. I also saw what I believed to be clearly defined section headers and key ideas. These key ideas were literally bolded on screen. Understanding the author’s uptake and see how my classmates and I had broken down the edutainment genre allowed me to empathize with the author in a completely new way. It also made his ideas abundantly clear once I could understand a bit more about the rhetorical situation. This isn’t just limited to the genres we covered in class, I’ve found myself being a better audience since our extended genre and rhetoric analysis.
Looking exclusively at project 2, I took alot away from developing our schema. Having to break down and define different parts of document made me look at writing in a new way. That’s not meant to be some “hazaaa” moment, but more I think analyzing the rhetorical situations around our genre really made it click for me. I wish we had added more detail to each paragraph-ish section of our feasibility study, but our project was already broken down significantly. The reason I wish we could have added more detail is because I think for working in XML you benefit alot from communicating small sections of writing’s individual uptakes. We definitely could have broken down our “page” elements more.
