Van Pelt 1

Jake Van Pelt

Megan Keaton
ENC2135
3 August 2016
Reflection
My progression through the course of Research, Genre, and Context has taught me many
important and defining aspects about being a composer and researcher. Throughout the course,
the numerous assignments, daily activities, and projects that I have worked on have helped in
bettering me as a composer and researcher through the various tasks that each put upon me.
Upon entering the course, I knew that my capabilities as a composer somewhere above par. As of
now, I can say that my abilities are at a higher substantial level due to projects like the Defining
and Analyzing Genre Project. My understanding of genre and its related terminologies was
developed through the various projects that I worked on with some having more influence than
others. My understanding of genre and genre conventions was put to the test in the Non-Essayist
Genre Project, where I was forced to compose in two genres that were not academic papers. The
project required that the genres be two complimentary genres that present data to teach my
audience, being my suitemate Chad, about the definition and related concepts of genre. While I
was able to succeed in both of my endeavors, (with said endeavors pertaining to the teaching of
genre to my audience and being able to correctly compose in two different genres by following
the genre conventions associated with each genre), the process was not without some hardships.
At first, I truly struggled to think about the two genres to compose in that would be able to

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properly teach Chad genre. My struggles lay in the fact that as a composer, the only genres that I
had ever known were the genres of essays and PowerPoints. After inquiring from a few fellow
classmates as to what they were planning on doing, I initially reached the decision to make a
PowerPoint and a Prezi. This proposal was rejected however, and so my chain of thought for how
pertaining to what I would include in my genres was reset. After giving consideration to the fact
that Chad is an aspiring film student and happens to enjoy reading blogs, I set my mind on
creating a video script and a blog on my portfolio containing multiple images with explanations
underneath about how factors of each image taught the different genre conventions that help
define a specific genre. In addition to these projects, my capabilities as a researcher were
improved through the various assignments pertaining to the peer grading of my fellow group
members projects. This experience helped me see other styles of writing that help in
distinguishing the author as well as getting to review the way a critic does and by doing so, was
noticing certain fallacies that people tended to make as well as seeing the various types of syntax
and styles that may be used, thus broadening my horizons regarding the various styles and
techniques that I, as a composer, feel capable of utilizing in my compositions. The course has
also helped me develop as a researcher with projects like genre research project, which was quite
a challenge as I choose to examine the various types of documents used in the Medical field. In
order to properly complete the assignment, I needed to have numerous credible citations which
involved undertaking the time consuming process of reading through my sources and then
finding quotable sections to use in the paper by quoting them directly or by paraphrasing them.
The assignments that helped me develop as a researcher were Short Assignment 4 and Short
Assignment 5, as they necessitated that I have satisfactory sources that I was to use in the actual
project. By pushing me to research well before I started typing up the paper, I was able to better

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understanding my topic and also include quotes that were quite apt for the place that I put them
in. With my positions of a composer and researcher being developed by the class, so was my
understanding of genre and its related terms.
Upon coming into the class, my definition of genre was that Genre is the
composition and manner of the way to which someone conveys a composition, whether it be
informal, informative, or to be with a certain style like country or street slang as defined by
myself in my Writing into the Day on 6/28/16. In Dirks Navigating Genres, I learned about how
in order to determine the genre of a composure, we rely upon our genre knowledge, past
experience with reading and writing similar texts in similar situations to help ourselves be able
to perceive a genre as it was meant to be (Dirk 250). I was then able to show this concept the
next day in class where we looked at three different wedding invitations, commented on the
design of each and wrote about what we thought were the required genre conventions for a
wedding invitation. It was during the Research tableaux that the concept of genre was further
exemplified in the sense that the class posing for a picture was essentially a genre. The genre of
the tableaux was the gene of an image being used to convey information, with the information in
this case being how we defined genre. The assignment that really helped me understand what
genre referred to was the Defining and Analyzing Research Project. In addition to being what
caused me to come to define genre as the way that we as humans interpret and classify ways
that information is presented based off our prior knowledge and experiences. During the project,
I reached this definition of genre based off the content of the readings and from some of the
presentations in class. With the project also requiring the defining of factors like genre
conventions, my understanding of genre was fully cemented as a result of working on the

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project. My understanding of genre was heavily utilized in the following two projects, being the
Genre Research Paper and the Composing in Non-Essayist Genre Project. In the first genre, I had
to delve into the genres within the medical field, a task that I would only be successful in if I had
a firm understanding of what genre referred to. Having gained a solid definition for genre during
the first project, I was able to successfully complete the second project by covering three of the
main genres in the medical field. The three genres that I chose to examine were the genres of
patient records, emails containing confidential information pertaining to the patient, and research
papers published explaining the results of medical studies as well as offering explanations as to
why the results were the way that they were. In the second genre, I was able to yet again provide
sufficient results due to my complete understanding of genre and its related terms most namely
being those that fall into the category of genre conventions. To teach Chad what actually referred
to, I ended up composing in the genres of film scripting and blogging. I settled for these genres
after giving the rhetorical situation thorough thought. Without a firm grasp on the concept of
genre, success in this course would have been impossible. However, the content and assignments
of the first two weeks helped me come to understand genre as I do today, providing a stable basis
to start from to complete the other assignments and projects in the class. With a firm grip on the
concept of genre, I was able to move onto the next major concept of research.
On the 11th of July, I wrote for my Writing into the Day that my understanding and
picture of research was that it typically looked like going into books or online sources and
recording quotes to be used in the research paper attached to the research one is doing. This was
exemplified during the Research Tableaux picture taken on July 7th. The project that really
affected my understanding of research was the Genre Research Project as it has out of all of the

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projects so far, taken the most time and resources to complete. The project required me to utilize
at least 10 sources, of which at least one needed to be an interview. My past experiences with
research were in a similar manner however, this project took the depth to a whole new level for
me. In high school during my Junior year I had to do a research project of which my subject was
Reaganomics with some of the basic requirements being to have at least seven credible sources
of which 4 needed to be print (although my teachers let google book sources count as print
sources). While this helped give me a premise to work off when approaching this project, I still
was a bit unsure of certain factors primarily regarding the level of detail and frequency of
citations that I would need to include in order create an academically credible paper. The
assignment that first began to truly help in redefining the way I understood research was Short
Assignment 4, which required 3 sources that I intended to use on my Genre Research Project.
Considering how the sources needed to be ones that I intended to use in the project, that meant
that I needed to actually fully reading the source. This differed substantially from what I had
done in the past because on past research papers, all I had done was type up the paper and then
go back through and find optimal places to add in citations to meet the requirement for the class.
As put by my Writing into the Day entry on July 11th, the way I used to find sources was by
finding something like a book or webpage article with a title similar to my topic, then use the
find function to search through the text trying to find keywords that would fit the context of
my paper. This was an incorrect plan of action as I may have potentially taken some excerpts out
of context, hence causing the reader of the paper to get the wrong idea about a what a certain
source was actually trying to say. Additionally, in this method, I could have missed out on
information that may have substantially strengthened my paper had I actually taken the time to
read the source. Both Short Assignment 4 and Short Assignment 5 were important in the

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alteration to how I defined research as they both challenged me to truly read my sources and
consider how I would correctly utilize them in the essay. Another important factor about research
I learned was the distinction between primary and secondary sources, being that Primary
sources get information directly from a subject while secondary sources are those that make use
of primary sources as noted in a tweet on July 12th I also learned more about how to find
sources, of which I noted in a tweet during the Library presentation on research on July 12th
being that you can use Wikipedia if you use the sources listed on the page to actually find the
information.
My third term that I now have an altered understanding of is design. When I entered the
course, my initial thoughts about design was that it was primarily referring to the aesthetics of a
document like the pictures and colors used in a brochure. While I was not wrong, there was still a
crucial part of design that I was missing and that was that in addition to the actual ascetics of the
composure. I was not aware that design also referred to the layout of the document, being similar
to syntax but with more focus on the way it will cause the reader to see the document than
actually understanding the overall meaning of it. Design has been quite important for me to learn
because I had to make use of it extensively for the Composing in a Non-Essayist Genre Project. I
ran into some difficulty with getting the design right for the project because I was trying to pick
the genre before I fully addressed the audience. I suppose the concept of having to compose in a
genre other than that of an essay at first startled me for I really didnt have any experience with
anything other than essays and PowerPoints. My general stress that the project was giving me
was clearly stated in a tweet I posted on the night before the project was due. Additionally, that
same night I also made another tweet in a desperate attempt to get help regarding how I would go

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about doing the project. In the early hours of the morning on August 1st, I had a breakthrough.
After consulting with Chad as to potential genres that I could effectively use to teach him, I
finally settled on doing a video (which was never accomplished, but the script for it was) and
making a sort of webpage (which I later changed the genre to being that of a blog as the second
genre lacked the genre conventions that would cause it to be considered a webpage). The design
of the genres was quite important as I needed to be able to present concepts to my audience
(being my suitemate) in a tactful manner yet, in two distinctly different ways. The design of each
genre is heavily influenced by the genre conventions associated with each genre, being that a
video (Script) typically has two characters engaged in dialogue with each other that can include
one of the characters informing the other character about something. My video fell under the
more specified genre of an educational video (Script). As for the design of the second genre, the
design itself is what was initially the problem for me to deal with. This is because the design of
the webpage was that it had a number of pictures with each picture receiving an explanation for
how it helps illustrate the concept of genre or any of the concepts associated with genre like
genre conventions. After a bit of though with regards to what I was to classify the second genre
as, I decided to label it as being a Blog (insert hyperlink), due to its design having various posts
and comments from a single author and no links to other pages.

Works Cited

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Dirk, Kerry. Navigating Genres. Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. Eds. Charles Lowe and
Pavel Zemliansky. Anderson: Parlor Press, 2010. writingspaces.org. Web. 27 Jun. 2016.
Pgs. 246-259