After establishing the schema over the course of several days, I used my mental framework of the schema layout while drafting an initial version of a science blog post in another medium, and then copied the text into XML and appropriately tagged and grouped the various structural and rhetorical elements. The schema overall felt appropriate for the situation, and provided the resources in the form of elements to explicitly mark up the body of text the post was built from. The schema itself did not exactly feel constraining, and served as a structural scaffolding to build the post around. In some cases, nuances in the schema structure itself (like the schema disallowing embedding of some elements within others) proved slightly annoying, but were easy to work around. Overall the ordered flow provided a good basis for walking through the genre for the first time, ensuring that the flowing process of the answer/explanation happened in the right order. Additionally, the flexibility inherent in the use of global elements provided a great toolbox of flexible elements to be used at the writer’s discretion.
I felt that my partner’s composition looked very similar to mine, though the content and exact style was slightly different. Looking at his schema and cases where oXygen indicated schema violations, it might be worth re-examining the ability to embed certain elements within others, as there were some instances where the schema was expecting an end tag where an element was embedded within another. This seemed to occur when one structural element was embedded within another.
The schema created in small groups felt more personal than the one created as a whole class, in that it was a tighter fit to my mental representation in the genre. This may be a result of working on the genre for a longer period of time and having a more direct impact on the final schema model, but overall I felt that the schema fit as much to my intentions for the composition as the composition fit the schema. In both cases there were elements or attributes that were not used, but in the case of the second writing project, those elements were made deliberately optional with the intention of only being used as the situation demanded, and were not as common in the genre examples that I personally researched. As a result, I was less prone to using them anyway.
I would be interested in making the “misconceptions” element a global one, removing the restriction of using it as a structural element to allow for flows/styles different from my own mental genre formula.
