The Edutainment blog post was the most interesting genre to me as it combines humor and science in a very unique way. I have read a fair amount of these blog posts throughout my time at Northeastern on topics related to my major of chemical engineering and others. This genre would be useful to me as I often have trouble explaining what my those in my field do to my family and friends. While I was on co-op, my younger brother frequently asked the question “So what do you actually do again?.” I had explained that I was working on process validation studies several times now, but couldn’t articulate my job description well enough in colloquial terms for him to understand my responsibilities. The edutainment style of a response specializes explaining complex scientific subjects to the average person without an extensive background. If I were to master the skills of this genre, I would have a much easier time explaining to my friends what chemical engineers typically do in their fields.
I doubt I would ever use an edutainment style post in my remaining academic career as most of my classes would require a more formal genre to summarize the projects I am apart of, but I could utilize it later in my professional career. If at my future job I was ever asked to do an interview with a journalist or news station I would want to utilize some elements of the edutainment genre to make the subject more entertaining and accessible for the average viewer. My goal would likely be to spark interest in whatever I was working on and a formal report analyzing the results in a very technical manner would not inspire any curiosity in the average person. By making the subject fun and using analogies to describe the science going on, it may generate the uptake of the audience (the general public) to do some more research into the subject or inspire a younger generation to choose a scientific field of study.
From the schema template, I learned that the genre of an edutainment is not very rigid and is designed to be flexible to suit the writing style of any particular author. The edutainment post also relies heavily on the use of graphics and other visuals to break up the text and present information in another way to the reader. It is somewhat unclear to me how long these edutainment posts tend to be. I have seen many that vary in length from a few cartoons being used to explain a scientific fact to a long article broken up with various images.
The tone of my classmates’ edutainment posts are informal and humorous. They make the subject matter interesting by not using a serious tone throughout the work and the use of graphics made it easier to stay interested in the subject. To complete my own version of this genre I will first need to determine if I will have time to do so, as the edutainment post seems like it could take a significant amount of time to do properly. However, if I find a subject that I am comfortable with, I believe I will be able to draft a decent edutainment post without too much trouble. The largest issue will be finding cartoons/images that go along with the subject well, as I do not have the time or the artistic talent to create them myself.
