Alayna Culbertson
Midterm Reflection
English 2089
Week one was overwhelming as I started to learn the basics of a blog and articles. Half-way through the semester and I can personally say I have learned a lot about writing as well as reading different types of articles and blogs. In the beginning I had no idea what to expect to learn from this course, I went in having no clue what I had ahead of me. I can say that within these first 7-8 weeks I have learned many skills that will help me in my future career as a psychologist.
Our first main project in this class was our profiles for the Activist. I had a good idea of what a profile was, but I wasn’t sure how to make one about someone else. I was able to make an individual profile about myself fairly easily however I had trouble with writing about someone else. I wasn’t sure where to start or what to even write about. I found the readings about audience and the examples of profiles very helpful as it gave me a sense of what to expect my final piece to look like. I found it very helpful that we knew who our audience was which is what pushed me to do a subject that out audience often times overlooks and doesn’t know much about, which is why I chose my profile to be about the advising office, specifically my advisor Lindsey Koertiz. When I came up with my plan as to how I was going to put my profile together, I was lost as to what was I going to ask my advisor and what do the students want or need to know. That is when I looked back on previous profiles we looked over and got inspiration and ideas from them. I asked myself what the motive was I had that gave me the idea for advising, and that was to inform students and give sort of a spotlight to the advising office and help students know what they do.
After posting my profile we had a speaker come into class that helped me get a better understanding of what grabs an audience’s attention and what will make my blog posts interesting and stand out. I learned what gets the most attention in the media. This not only I felt was important for writers but business starters as well. Anyone that wants attention drawn to their work on the internet could find this useful, I know I did.
Now learning what a genre was, was the hardest to grasp on to out of everything so far. Going into that lesson, the only thing that I could think of was the term of a music genre such as pop or rock. I found the articles, especially “Genre in the Wild”, very helpful as to understanding what genre was. I learned an overall definition from this article that not only goes with music styles but anything in the world. The graphs and comics in the article helped me relate more to the term genre. I was able to connect those to what the speaker said about a reader’s attention span. This helped me apply what I learned to my work in the group photo caption genre project.
Working as a team is important not only in school but in a job especially a career. The photo caption project taught me how to work effectively in a group and how to make work equally spread out amongst other coworkers. While at times I found it difficult I feel that this was a good first step into working in groups and helped us learn. We were able to connect what the speaker had told us about audience to what we wanted to edit about our photo caption list. We were able to get ideas like ordering our pictures and topics as well as how to shorten captions.
I also think it showed us what community was which also was shown in the article, “The Concept of Discourse Community.” I feel that this helped us think about what is important and relevant to the audience. When creating any kind of business post, you have to think of what the purpose is and who am I wanting to reach out to. What is the intended audience and what am I wanting them to take from my writing?
As I said previously, week one of this semester I was completely lost, and I can confidently say that I am excited to see what the second half of this semester has in store for my education. I have learned a lot within the past two months that I find very helpful and any student could find helpful while in college.
I really appreciate your comments and flow of thought from the “no clue” stage to being “excited to see what the second half of the semester will bring.” The profile section of the material threw us all for a loop at first, because writing about something or someone else is a lot different from writing about yourself and things you know well. The struggle was what type of content needed to be in the profile at first and then shifted to what type of content and communication style would reach the intended audience in the final drafts.
I agree that the section on genre was the most interesting, because I was not familiar with this term. Our group photo caption project taught us all a lot about the concept of genre. It was interesting to me when we put our photo caption drafts together that all four of us had addressed the same concept from different viewpoints that made it easy to merge our drafts together into a more comprehensive work on the subject. I think the big thing you emphasize is the point of “team” in writing. I think I would say more about this through ought your reflection because it is seeing what our peers are writing about and the angles they take on the same subject that helps us improve our compositions. It is interesting that the opening of many books is a word from the author thanking those on his or her “team” who contributed to the work by inspiration, editing, advice or emotional support. Thank you to those on my “team” for the recent project. We all make each other better.
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