Looking back to the beginning of the semester we were asked to write about what discourse communities meant to us. This was something I had never heard used before however when I started reading an article about it the term seemed familiar. For one of my Friday post entries I had written that “I see it academically where we as students communicate and often have goals..I say this because we as students are all here to learn and achieve goals.” For not having much of an understanding of what discourse communities really is, I think I did pretty well at giving my own explanation. I almost feel as if there is no set definition and people just have their own perceptions of what is. Reading The Concept of Discourse Communities by John Swales, I can confirm that maybe there are set characteristics to what makes something a true discourse community but I can also say that there may not be as many as John Swales proposes. John states “ However, survival of the community depends on a reasonable ratio between novices and experts.” Does there have to be a ratio? I would consider our class to be a discourse community, we have similar goals right? Though, none of us are “experts” or maybe not even novices. I wouldn’t say that my perception of discourse communities has changed but I have been paying more attention to what others have to say about it. I see the definition as very broad, there can be different alterations to each person. You can find an example of discourse communities within colleges, work places , and family households.
For me , genre is a little more complicated to wrap my head around. When I was younger I only thought of genre as types of books like mystery or scientific. I never thought there were types of genres we could run into daily such as articles, web pages and more. Reading Genre in The Wild by Lisa Bickmore I had more of an understanding. She described it as “a word we use when we want to classify things, to note the similarities and differences between kinds of writing.” I was able to familiarize it more and think about times I had used it such as writing my lab reports for school or even creating the photo caption assignment. She also added in a definition saying that “genre is a typified utterance that appears in a recurrent situation.” This also made it more clear for me because I began to think of party invitations and started to think about how social media works and why that is considered a genre system. Lisa says “But in social media, your genre system is always partly what you do, and partly what other people who are in your network do. It’s even partly what people outside your direct sphere do” The term is so much more broad that I had thought and there are so many possibilities. It makes me wonder if we will continue to make more genres just out of social norm and what those could potentially be with our technology growing constantly.
Beginning the profile project, I felt clueless. That is nothing I had never heard used but when I started reading examples I realized I had come across profiles constantly. For my profile I wanted to do something I was passionate about. I started with a local organization and went from there. Getting the information I needed wasnt difficult, the members cooperated so well and were very easy to talk to. The hardest part for me was trying to figure out my layout. I began with a simple Q&A but then did a bunch of word cutting because it was so distracting. Visually I thought my piece was very appealing. Ultimately, I think I was just missing too much information on the organization itself. Really I was disappointed. I felt that the Coalition wasn’t what I thought it was to begin with just by doing research on the website. I thought they helped with food and just daily necessities. However they more so helped with legalities and certain Acts that had been passed. Figuring that out had made it a little more difficult to decide how I was going to approach the project. I didn’t want to make it too wordy and try to explain every little detail, so what i did write almost didn’t seem like it were enough to cover the whole thing in depth. I’m still happy with what I did end up with even though I didn’t end up publishing it.
The Photo Caption assignment was my favorite out of the two. I liked how we split up into groups based on what we wanted to write about. The process of figuring out the photo caption genre was different than I thought. I never would have thought about some of the smaller details if we hadn’t had peer input. We began with just a random order of top things to do in Cincinnati and we did have it numbered. We completely changed it when we decided that a numbering sequence makes it seem like a ranking system. Next we had to decide what kind of ranking we would choose. We came up with multiple ideas like price range, least to most favorites and distance based. In this case we thought about our audience. In general we decided this article goes for UCBA students and people in our area. Students typically don’t want to break the bank by spending a lot of money so we went from least expensive to most expensive. We also had a conversation about why we chose 9 places instead of 10 or 5. Really it was a coincidence with choosing 9 but a lot of classmates said they kind of felt that 9 was intriguing. Trying to do a layout I kind of referred back to when the guest speaker was telling the class about catching the audiences eye and how really people skim read. We did a short introduction paragraph to try and keep it simple. Later on we had some suggestions to include the prices within each heading. So I went though and deleted the prices from the paragraphs and added it up at the very top so people could see that first. I also find that our pictures were appealing and choosing that first picture of Cincinnati as a whole was a good idea. Thinking about it I think we could have slightly improved it by adding hyperlinks to websites in case someone wanted to read more about them or find their exact location.
I also enjoyed watching the other groups edit their photo captions. Seeing what they started with and ended up with. Some of them made drastic changes and cut a lot of information out. Others added some more visuals and organized their pieces with a numbering sequence as well. I think the reviewing process helped all of us and getting some feedback from the professor and the students.
Doing the photo caption seemed really easy with my group. There were no miscommunications. All of us had 3 certain places to write about and add a picture for . When it came to editing we all pitched in and with a simple text you’d get a response quickly.
B) For a collaborative presentation we really haven’t talked about what we are doing yet. A possibility would be a powerpoint to make it simple.
Writing 