Writing in XML markup definitely changed my writing process. Whenever I write, I follow the prompt and make sure to respond to all parts of it. However, my writing seems more natural when I am not using XML. I think that this is because the markup schema has a rigid structure. All of the elements are explicitly blocked out. On one hand this is good because it reminds you exactly what you need to include in the writing project. On the other hand, it makes my writing feel more disjointed.
For my sources, the schema that we created in class seemed somewhat awkward. In all of the examples that we saw, each source was an academic book or article dedicated only to the research topic. Some of my sources were different because I was researching ways that electrical engineering skills could be applied realistically to solve different food crises. Some articles gave brief overviews of different companies’ products that solved these issues. Since the articles were not research papers, there were obviously no experiments performed whose “approach” I could describe. Also, I could not point to these articles and say that they represented some kind of foundational text like I could with a published paper in a journal.
From Genre as Social Action, genre represents action with a situation and motive. In this project’s annotated bibliographies, the situation is finding relevant sources to a problem our discipline could solve. The motive is to show these sources and explain why they are valuable to us. We accomplished this by writing the annotated bibliography according the schema. In this, we included a problem statement that explained how our discipline could solve a unique problem. In the annotations of sources, we gave some background on the source we used to establish credibility of the author or source. We also gave some summary of the source’s content, and we later explained its relevance.
