Final Reflection

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Looking back, I actually learned a significant amount; not only about genres and the practice of writing papers; but what skills I have mastered and what skills as a writer I can improve on throughout my academic career at Florida State. I personally felt like in each project I learned a little more about writing and a little more about what I do no and do not like about writing certain genres.

 

In the beginning, I found Project One to be relatively easy both in writing it and applying a personal narrative that I had experienced. I was able to really pick a story from a community I cherished, and in the long run it made making a personal narrative out of it really easy and really enjoyable. My biggest challenge when it came to my very first project was avoiding the simple mistakes that could cause much bigger problems. Once I had met with Matt, he was able to point out to me that I was actually generalizing too much; which at first made no sense to me whatsoever. I always thought that by generalizing you were leaving out the non-essential details; but in actuality the lack of preciseness can leave a person with more questions than answers. On a side note, I used way too many repetitive words so I had to take to a thesaurus and plug in some synonyms, or take some words out. Once I was finished with the first project I was both confident in my ability to write personal narratives and pick out certain communities that I could talk about, and my overall grade reflected that sense of knowledge.

 

Project Two, on the other hand, was a complete pain for me to do as a writer; and it took me until the very last week of class to actually submit it and get a grade for it. Granted, I did not do bad and I got a relatively good grade, it was just not a fun paper to type. I literally felt like I was forcing myself to type it, almost like a zombie just splattering words on the paper just to make it to the minimum word requirement. Speaking of that, I was so lazy on doing it that I showed up to my meeting with Matt with a half-finished paper because it made me feel that dead inside to do it. My area of health and fitness that I picked interested me, and the specific text I chose from this area was something I could easily pick apart and talk about in detail, it was just the task of actually writing this paper. Having to go through and cite the sources, make sure my citations were properly done, have the annotated bibliography and the works cited page, meet the word requirement, and hit all the bullet points just made me not want to do it. To be honest, if this was not such a huge part of my grade, I probably would have half-assed it to the fullest extent possible. I would have much preferred simply discussing my text in detail with a few key sources to use, and the pros and cons of that text in the community. As a writer, I did not enjoy typing this paper and preferably will avoid typing this genre for as long as I can possibly avoid it. Typing this type of genre honestly made me appreciate writing personal narratives and stories versus papers with factual information in them.

 

Although I despised Project Two, Project Three really brought a joy back into me and allowed me to get creative with both my own perspectives on how to present genres and how I can tie different genres into communities I involve myself with. Project Three’s use of several different genres within the multi-media presentation really changed my perspective on just how many different audiences someone has to think about when using different genres. I actually had fun finding my three genres, and incorporating my own twist on them to have them meet my needs in terms of getting this project done. One part of my multi-media genres presentation that I honestly liked was typing up my own website and sharing my own thoughts on a blog, it really felt like a good outlet to vent and share my own personal information and views. I was so invested on this project that I got it done on time, and even volunteered to present it first out of the whole class.

 

Overall, these projects taught me who I am as a writer; more specifically what I can get myself interested in and writing about fluidly and what things I do not enjoy writing at all. Even though that is the case, it’s important that I extract the overall idea that there are so many different genres out in the world, and each one is unique in its own way in comparison to all the others. The few genres that we discussed and wrote on in class don’t even scratch the surface on the depth of how many genres a person could honestly focus on and apply to the various communities throughout the world.