The schema was overall designed to provide some structure, but leave most of the element use and order up to the discretion of the author. In this way, the schema provided “guidelines” or a loose framework, akin to perhaps a rubric, as opposed to serving as a template meant for blanks to be filled with content. I personally found that the schema provided just the right balance for structure and style, in part because I had influenced the generation of the schema based on my own mental interpretation of the genre, and then followed that style/structure in my composition. Other group members found some elements a bit constraining, so we added more flexibility, merging two specific elements and making some rigid elements global. Much of this originally came directly from the research, in which various forms of the genre exist, but it was up to our group to decide where to draw the line between what constituted our genre, and what was something else. In accounting for these similar but slightly different examples, the resulting schema was made to consist of an array of global elements that could be used at the author’s discretion.
Overall, the writing in XML is pretty natural, and the schema we developed was created with the intention of not being too tedious to complete correctly. While it takes more effort to break down sentences/paragraphs into discrete elements, as opposed to simply writing them without markup, the process makes the entire situation more explicit and confers greater understanding of the writing that is taking place.
I found both the group and individual aspects great for developing my understanding of writing. It was important to work in a group to develop the schema, to allow for different ideas and perspectives to collectively decide what would universally make the most sense, as opposed to being based solely on one person’s perspective of what they believe the genre entails. With our genre in particular, the individual component was interesting in that while the composition process itself reinforced the understanding of how the genre behaves, comparing the end products of each individual demonstrated how individual authors with the same genre and rulebook can create pieces that are remarkably diverse. I found it most interesting to see how the compositions were similar, and how they were different, and through that discussion and comparison after the fact, new perspectives were gained (such as from one person’s use of a certain element, or another person’s flow, etc.).
If I were to change anything, I might increase the group size (we only had 4 members, it may have been interesting to have even more perspectives with 5 or 6, though reaching a consensus might have been more difficult). Overall, I feel this project went very well, and like how it is interfacing with WP3 in that individuals outside the original group will be electing to compose a piece of another genre. It will be interesting from the perspective of the process itself to see the outcomes of others’ work, what thoughts they have about the schema and what changes they would make, etc.
