Madison Kessler
Professor McLaughlin
February 25, 2020
Midterm Reflective Check-in
In the past 7 weeks, we’ve done two important papers in class: our profile article and our photo caption list. When we first started our profile articles, we discussed a term called discourse community. At the time, I had no idea what it was called, but it made sense the more I read about it and discussed it in class. Discourse community is a group of people that share a common goal. For example, students that are studying pre-business here at UCBA is a specific discourse community, since all of those students are wanting to get a degree in some field of business. I had no idea what I was going to write about because I wanted to make it interesting for students to actually read the whole article. I always want my pieces to get my readers thinking and put an impact on their perspective. I chose the topic of how Insomnia Cookies started from a dorm room, literally. I wrote about how Seth Berkowitz started the company from nothing and now there’s over 100 locations in the United States. I had tweaked a few sentences, switched some quotes around and I was ready to move onto the next step of my piece.
That day we were introduced to a new “project”, which were the photo caption lists. I knew exactly what we had to do by looking at the example links provided in WordPress. I always look a ton of those weekly, so I wanted to make the one I was involved with interesting. Our group includes Cj, Abby, and I. We focused on affordable place to go/activities to do in Cincinnati since I’m always looking for ways to get out of the house. The process for finding things to do in the city wasn’t that hard and I learned about a few places that I would like to go to myself. We split the list between the three of us, so there were 9 things on our photo caption list in total. Cj, Abby and I all did our parts and got it done on time, although I formatted all of the worked together and would update it when we got feedback. Communication was kept up between the three of us which was good. The 9 places/ activities were placed 1-9 from cheapest to most expensive, which wasn’t too expensive considering it was $36 dollars tops. We did get our piece published to The Activist which felt pretty accomplishing to me.
I worked well with my peers in my group. Cj wrote three good paragraphs about the places he chose to write about and would always give feedback on what we could change or add to our photo caption list. Abby at first didn’t write much about her three places of choice, but she then went back and revised her paragraphs which I appreciated. Although I did format the photo caption list together, Cj and Abby were always willing to help make changes and send me any thoughts they had or ideas for improvement. Communication was kept up well. We had a group chat and whenever anyone of us had a question, the other peers would always answer and give feedback on time which I appreciated as well. All in all, I wouldn’t mind working with Cj and Abby again.
Since I put my effort and time into the photo caption list, I really didn’t have time to update my profile article. I couldn’t get in contact with Seth Berkowitz for a primary quote and I never took the time to add in my pictures in the places I wanted them in my piece. I would’ve liked to take a day in class to get my focus back into my profile article because I thought it was close to publication, but I never got it done.
Seven weeks ago, I had no idea about discourse communities and why the term is important to learn. Recently we were given an article called “The Concept of Discourse Community” and discussed more about the term “discourse community”. I didn’t really learn anything new besides the six defining characteristics of discourse communities, which I found interesting. Our group was to analyze all six of the characteristics and we agreed that the last one wasn’t technically true. The sixth rule wrote, “A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.” The reason we didn’t agree with this statement is because a discourse community has shifted its goals, meaning, or belief over time. For example, feminism had a different meaning than it does today. Between the years 1848 and the 1970s, feminism stood for equal rights and equal pay. In todays society, feminism is looked at as a way to dominate men and become superior to them; not all feminists believe so, but the term has evolved over time with society. The discourse community of women now is completely different to the discourse community of women back in past years. One of the characteristics that I found interesting was the second characteristic which states, “A discourse community has mechanism of intercommunication among its members.” As an example, someone who was majoring in Pre-Med may not know the terms data mining or data warehousing like how business majors know them. That is because different discourse communities hold different terms that only that community knows to understand and use.
Another term that we’ve discussed in class in genre. We were told to also read an article called “Genre in the Wild”, which was about what genre is and in class we discussed our interpretation of what the term means. I said that a genre is a collection of different formats of writing set into groups depending on the tone and context of the format; sometimes with an indicated use of pictures. Along with discussing our definition of genre, we were told to also think about what a photo caption genre is. To me, a photo caption genre is a list of images corresponding with a sentence or paragraph correlated to the images provided; with numbers favored to be in order. I found that it’s easier to define what a photo caption genre is compared to what a genre is defined as.
For our collaborative presentation, I’m still not sure what we are supposed to be doing since it’s not clearly stated in WordPress or clearly discussed in class. I’m not sure what our group is doing for this presentation and what we are supposed to be writing about.
Madison Kessler 