Overall my grade aimed for was a B. After writing the final reflection I am not sure a B+ is okay or not. I think I did enough work but it was hard for me to write thoughts into words. My concept of discourse communities is clear. Genre is clear too however its complex and difficult to write in words how that shapes our perception. I am proud of my work this semester and what i’ve learned. Here are some things I have accomplished:

Profile, photo caption, Friday post, journal entries, midterm reflection, final reflection, separate activist post, revisiting the readings.

Everything should be on my WordPress site and everything has been turned in on time.

My midterm and final reflections are under the subcategory tabs labeled. All of my Friday posts and other writings are on my home page as well.

   Looking back to the beginning of the semester I was not quite sure what to expect. I remember being so confused on grasping certain concepts and that was clear to see in some of my journal entries. One in which I wrote that “I have no idea what to do.” This was before beginning the profile assignment we had at the beginning of the semester. It wasn’t until I read some examples on The Activist before I even decided what a profile actually is. This was before I knew what genre was too, so I just had an idea of what a profile should “require.” It was my first introduction to a type of genre. 

   My perception of what makes a profile to be a profile was solely based on the examples I had seen. Some points include that it is an article written on someone or an organization. Either a question and answer format or a few paragraphs with direct quotes of these people. Typically, either something about their life or what the company does and how it affects a community.  I went through a lot of changes, I began with a full question and answer paper but then realized that it was very lengthy and didn’t get much attention from readers in the beginning. So I switched it up. I cut out almost half of my words and used direct quotes from The Coalition in which I chose. I wrote about key points and how they benefit our community here in Cincinnati. I also began with some facts that weren’t too appealing to see as a resident of the greater Cincinnati area about homelessness. Even after writing this profile, I was unaware then about this genre and what I should make of it. Something that I strongly connected this profile to was the concept of discourse communities. 

   According to The CCCC’s article “Discourse Communities”, this is how it is described, “it’s a group of people, members of a community, who share a common interest.” In this case I can definitely agree. We see this concept constantly whether it’s at a workplace, in our families or here at UC Blue Ash. I see it as everyone within a group as sharing the same goals, collaborating together for a similar outcome. The article mentions that these people have the “same language.” I would consider this to be incorrect, in my theory of  discourse communities I think diversity is a part of what makes it important. Same thoughts and interests don’t have to be the same language. I see it as our casual classroom where we as students work together to achieve the same goals. Doesn’t necessarily have to be a long term goal like graduation but as simple as completing and assignment. Discourse communities relate to me personally by my major of choice. Being in radiology there are standards in which everyone in that workplace will have. We all have goals of keeping a patient healthy, getting the scans we need by MRI or XRay. Overall, we are all working to get an end goal to benefit and help the patient. That’s the smaller picture, you can go even larger and think about how a hospital as a whole is a discourse community. Everyone in there is working for the patient’s benefit. Whether it’s social work, billing, nursing or surgeon. 

   Moving into our photo caption assignment, I felt more confident about what regulations were to classify this as this type of genre. These are something  I’ve seen before and that I felt I could write about anything that I enjoy. I would classify an article to be a photo caption if it contained many pictures with a small paragraph or less. These vary in the way that they are written, some in order by a ranking or casually scattered. 

   So after these assignments the question came up. What is genre? Lisa Bickmore described it well in Genre in the Wild as “So a genre is an act of language—for our purposes here, mostly acts of writing, in particular—that behaves in typical or characteristic ways, which we can observe in repeated or persistent situations.” We see these often and not always in writing. I thought about it in my workplace. My job is so consistent that I do the same thing repeatedly. A customer walks in and sits down, I greet them with “how are you today? My name is Abby. I’ll be taking care of you today..” Actually is so normalized that we actually do call this a 2 minute greeting. It seems that there are more opportunities when written though. Like invitations, maybe a twitter post or even a daily newspaper. Now within that broadened term of genre, there are classifications. In which we called photo caption, profiling, and many others. These are the ones that have these characteristics that you would be able to recognize as a certain genre. A lot of genres have different tones used that make them vary slightly. 

  Before I was asked to write about what puzzles me about this course. In my midterm reflection I had written that “Perhaps, I just feel as if I don’t know if there is a correct answer or not.” Well at the time I didn’t understand why there weren’t really regulations to what our assignments were. Other than the typified utterance that reoccurs called genre according to Lisa Bickmore and what characteristics we thought they needed. Our assignments were very broad because we were encouraged to explore. By explore I mean figure out we think these genres should include and look like. It is about our perception, so really is there a wrong answer? No, because genre varies in so many different ways. To the point if someone wrote an article and its characteristics were slightly off from normal people either wouldn’t question it or it may become a new “trend” that is recognized. Lisa describes this as “genres evolve and change over time, and each user taking up a genre takes it up just a little bit differently” Since everyone takes it up a little differently, the chances of genre evolving and adding new recognizable traits will occur. 

   Vivian Giang wrote that, “Other factors, like culture, meaning the traditions and habits we pick up from those around us, also shape the way we talk, the things we talk about, and hence, changes the way we think or even how we remember things.” Is genre almost like a habit? Or a trend where people see it and follow it? The way we change these genres changes our perception and Vivian described it well. Similar to how we name things with words. They were just made up and then people used them recurrently. Actually, the article No One Could See the Colour Blue Until Modern Times by Kevin Loria says people didn’t even notice the color blue until it was named. Again with someone’s perception changing a genre. 

   In a huffpost Morty Lekoe says “In order for any given thing to exist, there must also be something other than that thing.Consider this for a moment. Can you see that any physical object is bounded by “not that object”? If an object did not have any borders — that is, if it wasn’t surrounded by “not that object” — it couldn’t be distinguished from everything else. In other words, it wouldn’t exist.” If something cannot be distinguished from things around it, it doesn’t really exist. Relating this back to genre, it’s about our perception and what we regularly see.  

   Now that we have moved to distance learning I am still enjoying reading about perception and genre. It seems complex to think about but it’s something to do while at home. Learning online hasn’t been easy. My science classes have been a pain and some professors think they are helping us by giving more assigned work. I am excited to get back to work but also I am not panicked anymore. Without feeling anxious about Covid, I have had so much time to spend time with my family which I don’t get to do often. It’s been nice to be home, I guess my only concern is money so I did recently get a job as an STNA. I am someone that needs a daily schedule to function. I am unable to sit inside all day, I have to do something for motivation. For The Activist, I wrote something short on how to pass online classes. I included keeping this schedule and planning out your days. I enjoyed writing this short article because I know it’s something all of us are struggling with right now during distance learning. However I can’t decide what genre it could fall under. I did include pictures so I leaned towards photo captions. However my paragraphs were not directly focused on what those pictures were. Earlier I mentioned how hospitals were an example of a discourse community. During Covid-19, these workers are doing everything they can to help their patients including risking getting the virus. I read a post about doctors sleeping in the hospitals for nurses sleeping in their garages to prevent spreading it to their families. Again, they are 

working for the same outcome, to keep everyone safe and healthy. 

Sources

Lefkoe, Morty. “Huffpost Is Now A Part Of Verizon Media”. Huffpost.Com, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-our-perceptions-shape_b_839089.

Loria, Kevin. “No One Could See The Colour Blue Until Modern Times”. Business Insider Australia, 2015, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2.

Secure.Ncte.Org, https://secure.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CCC/0641-sep2012/CCC0641PosterDiscourse.pdf.

Giang, Vivian. “How Language Shapes Our Perception Of Reality”. Pocket, https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-language-shapes-our-perception-of-reality?utm_source=pocket-newtab.

Bickmore, Lisa. “GENRE In The WILD: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical (Eco)Systems”. Openenglishatslcc.Pressbooks.Com, https://openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-genre-within-rhetorical-ecosystems/.

   Looking back to the beginning of the semester I was not quite sure what to expect. I remember being so confused on grasping certain concepts and that was clear to see in some of my journal entries. One in which I wrote that “I have no idea what to do.” This was before beginning the profile assignment we had at the beginning of the semester. It wasn’t until I read some examples on The Activist before I even decided what a profile actually is. This was before I knew what genre was too, so I just had an idea of what a profile should “require.” It was my first introduction to a type of genre. 

   My perception of what makes a profile to be a profile was solely based on the examples I had seen. Some points include that it is an article written on someone or an organization. Either a question and answer format or a few paragraphs with direct quotes of these people. Typically, either something about their life or what the company does and how it affects a community.  I went through a lot of changes, I began with a full question and answer paper but then realized that it was very lengthy and didn’t get much attention from readers in the beginning. So I switched it up. I cut out almost half of my words and used direct quotes from The Coalition in which I chose. I wrote about key points and how they benefit our community here in Cincinnati. I also began with some facts that weren’t too appealing to see as a resident of the greater Cincinnati area about homelessness. Even after writing this profile, I was unaware then about this genre and what I should make of it. Something that I strongly connected this profile to was the concept of discourse communities. 

   According to The CCCC’s article “Discourse Communities”, this is how it is described, “it’s a group of people, members of a community, who share a common interest.” In this case I can definitely agree. We see this concept constantly whether it’s at a workplace, in our families or here at UC Blue Ash. I see it as everyone within a group as sharing the same goals, collaborating together for a similar outcome. The article mentions that these people have the “same language.” I would consider this to be incorrect, in my theory of  discourse communities I think diversity is a part of what makes it important. Same thoughts and interests don’t have to be the same language. I see it as our casual classroom where we as students work together to achieve the same goals. Doesn’t necessarily have to be a long term goal like graduation but as simple as completing and assignment.   

   Moving into our photo caption assignment, I felt more confident about what regulations were to classify this as this type of genre. These are something i’ve seen before and that I felt I could write about anything that I enjoy. 

Our photo caption assignment is something that may people in the Cincinnati area would find to be helpful and a good read. It appeals to many people and that is a good strength of it. We also added some good pictures and did a order in which students especially would like. It was a fun assignment to do and I think the humor adds some character.

I don’t see many weaknesses to this assignment, I think it turned out really well! Only thing I could say is that some places were hard to elaborate on and give more information about especially with prices that vary upon age, season and activities.

The profile assignment was something that I struggled with the most. I think most of it was because it was my first time working with this new type of genre. Overall, it did qualify to be a profile based on my format and what was written. So that was a strength to it. Also another strength is that it was visually appealing. I loved the way it turned out looking and the length of it wasn’t too long or too short.

It however wasn’t ready to be published. I had some weaknesses that made me refrain from wanting to publish it like I had planned to. Part of it was my lack of information, when I began to piece it all together I had realized that the organization I had written about was more of an advocacy group than providing much help to those in need. It made it more difficult to write about since it wasn’t exactly like I had expected it to be. Also, in order to publish it I would’ve had to go and take my own pictures and again they only hold some events throughout the year.

“No One Could See the Colour Blue Until Modern Times”

-This article is about perception and how it’s evolved. It talks about how before,  the color blue was not seen and how it became “discovered” to what we know now to be as blue. Basically saying do you actually see something if there’s no name for it. 

-This was my favorite article to read, because I love the unknown. This reading questions so much that we do not usually think about day to day. There is a graphic of green squares and it asks which is a different shade. I was unable to differ between them. Something that was even stranger to think about is where Gladstone counted the references to each color in the book and black and white were mentioned a lot whereas other others such as red and yellow were mentioned very little and blue not at all.  Regularly I see the color blue, like looking at the sky. Do you think people didn’t see the color at all, or just didn’t name it until later. Like was it evolved? These are questions that puzzle me. 

The CCCC’s article “Discourse Community”

-This is a very short article on what discourse community means. It also gives a significance section to say how it is significant to us when writing and questioning our own work. 

-This is the article that first introduced me to the term Discourse Communities. I immediately related it to UCBA and many other organizations. I took it as people who share common goals working together. It is very widespread and common however it is  not necessarily something I have thought about until after reading this article. I didn’t know what the term meant so I never really associated in depth what it meant when people work together and want to achieve similar outcomes in a similar setting. Looking back to this article I think about the profile project we had and how The Coalition I wrote about works together. I want to know if there’s other terms for smaller discourse communities within a larger discourse community. Like are there different types of them named I guess?

“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan

-In this article Amy wrote about her mother who spoke Chinese and broken english. Amy talks about how living in a family with broken languages seemed to be a limitation but that actually there is a deeper understanding. She mentions how this language shaped the way she sees the world and how it affects her and her family.

-Firstly, I read this article out loud. There are parts where she quotes what her mother says when speaking in broken English. When I was reading it my family clearly knew what I was saying even though there were things missing and out of order. I was going to say I don’t know how people don’t understand it,  but then I thought I easily comprehend it because my grandma speaks broken english regularly because she is hispanic. Going off what Amy says at the very end, she says her mother said her writing was very easy to read because of how she had written it. I think it’s a way of understanding people and how they perceive languages. Sometimes people don’t comprehend or understand to a full ability and so we made these modifications or broken languages. They’re a way of communication which can easily be understood to them personally. Many Americans do not speak a second language or at least I do not know many that can, so I see these broken languages as a step further and an attempt to get your point across when learning a new language. 

How Language Shapes Our Perception of Reality

-Vivian Giang describes different ways in which language has made us question our perceptions. She includes some examples which have an impact on how we perceive things such as words, grammar and metaphors.

-In the article Vivian mentions how in Russia they have multiple words for different shades of blue. Kind of like how we have pink and red but really pink is red just lighter. I immediately related this back to the first article “No One Could See the Colour Blue Until Modern Times.” Both readings are based on perception and mention that studies say you are unable to see a color until there’s a word for it. I find it so hard to wrap my head around. Also in this article she says that people in Brazil and the Amazonas do not keep track of exact quantities. It is something I would like to experience once, to go to a country that has these different language perceptions and see how my understanding would kick in. 

Also, out of quarantine purposes, I have read these articles to my family just so they feel a little mind blown. 

Writing my Tips for Remote Learning, I think its something that I myself struggled with at first and that students may find helpful. I do want to publish it on The Activist but I am not sure what improvements to make.

I contemplated for a long time about what genre this is. Definitely has advice and pictures, but its not a photocaption or advice column. I am not sure what genre to call this actually. I know it is not a photocaption because my writing is not based on the photos. My photos are based on what I wrote and there’s not many of them. I did use a number sequence, in my mind it just means from most important to least important. It could maybe be an opinion piece however I did use some factual information.

Quarantine Style

Abigail Joseph              4/2/2020

Switching to online classes can be hard. Lack of motivation and unorganization can get the best of you. Here are five tips to help you stay on track:

1. Plan it out

Write yourself a weekly planner. Begin with writing days your assignments are due and try to finish them early if possible. Many professors do things differently so make sure you understand where to find your assignments and lectures.  Write in when you would like to study for each class and for how long. Don’t forget to leave time for yourself! Get out and take a walk, or do an activity you’ve been wanting to do. 

2. Have a Good Study Space

Where you study matters. Practice better study habits by putting your phone away. I tend to study better when in bright lighting preferably natural light. I don’t have a desk handy at home so I enjoy doing my work outside or at the kitchen table. 

3. Take Good notes

If you’re listening to an online lecture, take notes like you’re actually in class. Be attentive and take good notes-but don’t overwrite. Highlight key points that may be important. If you have questions write them down and send them in an email later. 

4. Have a few breaks

Take productive study breaks when needed. Many studies have shown that taking breaks between studying increases success and positivity.  Do something energizing like take a shower or clean your room. Try not to lay down, binge watch tv, and scroll through social media for long periods of time. 

5. Make it Enjoyable

Listen to your favorite music. Reward yourself with a snack or two after studying, or my personal favorite- coffee and more coffee. 

Speaker Notes (first two slides) :

The other slides on paranormal activity and psychology were my groups.

• Horror films being a type of genre have changed standards over the years. What characteristics actually consider a scary movie to be scary? Beginning in the early 1900’s “scary” was all about creatures or monsters. Horror films tapped into the imagination of things that didn’t exist such as Dracula or Frankenstein. Then characteristics changed into blood and gory. Most of the scary movies then , such as Halloween contained some type of murderer with brutal killings-and typically shown a lot of blood.

I am a writer , and by no means a perfect one. I was a character that was quiet and intuitive. Actively reading different posts or websites but never reading between the lines for what they are. Now, I am able to analyze a little deeper. Often thinking about things I haven’t before and questioning more often. Mostly about perception, and how it really can change everything. In the future, I will continue to broaden my knowledge. Realize that there is even more I did not know.

For this class, I am often puzzled on structure. I have never taken a course where there weren’t any guidelines to an assignment or specific rules. I know this gives us many possibilities to come up with a finished project and a way of thinking differently. Perhaps, I just feel as if I don’t know if there is a correct answer or not.