This Semester

Prompt:

This semester you have had opportunities to analyze features of academic, professional, and public texts. You have also had opportunities to write academic texts, present for a general audience, and to compose blog posts and tweets for social media. Given what you now know about rhetorical choices, genre, and language history and change, reflect on the nature of writing in 2015. What challenges and opportunities do new technologies/platforms offer?

Choose only 2 examples and explain.

Identify examples among your own blog posts and those of your peers of successful responses to the unique challenges and opportunities of that genre.

To the right are the outcomes for the writing course I took this semester (Writing 121).

Response:

With every new social media site or way of communication there forms a new genre of writing. Blog writing is different from tweeting is different from instagram captions. I think this is beneficial in the way that people can promote themselves and learn in whatever way they choose by communicating in a way or multiple ways that they find most comfortable. Different fields are using different modes of communication, so being exposed to different types of social media is not useless; is is becoming more and more of a predominant part of culture.

Another thing that genres like blogs do is make complex information discovered in studies by professors easier to understand for the average person. Many people who are very involved in a field have a blog, and this allows for complex information to be simplified so more people can obtain knowledge on a variety of subjects.

However, with this, there is also more availability of false information to the average user. This can create an ocean of unreliable information that people believe because it 'sounds right' or 'makes sense' with no evidence for how credible the source is. Because of this it is important to understand how to justify what sources are and are not credible.

This is the textbook our course curriculum was based off of.

Celebration of Student Writing

Prompt:

Write about your experiences at the Celebration of Student Writing. What kinds of presentations did you observe? What kind of range? What do you think is the added value or decreased value of large celebrations of peer writing?

This is the board I made for the Celebration of Student Writing. It was based on the research I did regarding muscle growth.

Response:

This Celebration of Student Writing was supposed to be more sustainable this semester, but I noticed that most people made boards as opposed to doing something electronic. A lot of the presentations were interactive as well and I noticed many people giving out candy as well. There was a huge variety of topics covered by students, from projects about multiple sclerosis to comic book characters.

Having a large celebration like this provides for a more relaxed environment in the way that people don’t pay much attention to your project as they do to their friends, but that is also a downfall considering the time and effort that went into doing the research and making the projects. Because people are there with a lot of people they know they are not likely to have the attention span to listen to you talk for seven minutes. Also, there were so many projects it was hard to decide which one to go to.

Preparing a five to seven minute long presentation really wasn't necessary. People would usually just come along and you would have a conversation about your topic as opposed to you spouting off information the whole time. Personally I liked it because I didn't have to give my presentation and it was a very lively environment but no one really even came over to see my project. Maybe it would help if the projects were sectioned off by topic (like medical projects in one area and psychological ones in another area and artistic ones in another area) so people could go to whatever area interests them. It was a fun experience to be around so many other people in my same writing course, I do think that there are a lot of issues with how the celebration is laid out.