Writing our first assignment in XML format had a significant impact on the way that I wrote. Being someone who is used to writing most of my assignments in a word processor, I will admit that I did actually start the project there and then transferred it over to XML in pieces. Having that XML format and having the class defined attributes was a huge help when it came to focusing my writing and making sure that I was able to address everything that I needed to.
However, my biggest struggle with the program was the inability to format certain ways. For example, quotations were only allowed in the background and summary portions of the annotations where I had gotten a quote from a source pertaining to its audience and relevance. For my problem statement I would have liked to make it so that different statements were grouped more obviously by adding paragraphs, however the program would not allow for this type of formatting here. Additionally, as person with pretty rough spelling abilities, not having the autocorrect function that seems to have made its way into all of our typical forms of communication in today’s society was really hard. Having the lines of text continue out beyond the bounds that were easily visible in the markup program made it hard to be sure that words were correctly spelled, that grammar was used properly, or even if all of the different parts that we needed to include flowed together properly. Being able to see the formatted version online after it was synced and uploaded was incredibly helpful. I just think it would have been more helpful if that upload happened instantaneously so that we could make corrections as we went. There were a couple of occasions that I read the formatted product and realized that sentences were not stringing together in the way that I had intended or that punctuation was clearly missing in the different citations.
Overall, I think that writing the final project in XML format was a bit unnecessary and that all of the benefits that I got from having it could have been taught or displayed more easily in a simple outline of required elements. However, that could be a personal preference due to the way that my brain chooses to organize information. This XML format may make more sense to other people.
