FINAL REFLECTION
Nicholas Cerbone
Mat Wenzel
ENC 2135.142
April 24, 2017
Final Reflection
When I registered for this English class, the title of the course came up as “Research, Genre, and Context”. I was a little confused because I was expecting a way different title. The title “Writing, Reading, and Thinking” would make more sense to me because it sounds like an actual English class. Maybe it was just the word “genre” that was throwing me off. I always understood genre just as a category, mainly for movies and music. So why would we be talking about categories in a college English class? It wasn’t too long until I completely understood the purpose of genres in my English class. The first project involved discovering genres in a community that I was involved in or presently involved in. I immediately thought about the sports community at my high school because I have been involved with sports ever since my freshman year. I decided to pick football, basketball, and weightlifting as three genres to talk about because those are three categories of sports. However, I soon realized those genres would not work for this assignment. It was the beginning of the semester when the instructor explained that we needed to focus on genres of composition. And once I read chapter 1 in “The Bedford Book Of Genres”, I fully understood what type of genres were expected. My three new genres for project 1 included: a scale posted in the locker room that kept tract of money we raised, an advertisement for a fundraiser, and discount cards with team information on them. The second project is similar to the first one in that I must discover genres in a community. But this community must be one that I am interested in and plan on joining. I decided to pick the medical community because I am studying biochemistry and I plan on going to medical school and becoming a doctor. I thought I would be able to write about some genres regarding the MCAT, but after doing research I found it extremely boring and repetitive. I didn’t get rid the MCAT completely but instead I wrote about the process of getting into medical school starting as an undergraduate student. I believe this was my best paper I wrote this semester because I included many genres that pre med students would come across while an undergraduate student. I thought this was an enjoyable and interesting paper to write because I was passionate about the subject and I learned more about my own community. Now that I have experience in writing about different genres of composition, I can finally create my own genres. For project three I created three genres related to my community. I created a twitter page for pre-med students at FSU, a poster to advertise the page, and a thank you email back to the person I interviewed. I feel like the order of these projects were set-up on purpose so we could gradually understand the purpose of genres. Project three was probably the most important because it forces students to have an understanding of how to communicate with different audiences using the many genres we learned throughout the year. I can now say the title of this class makes sense to me because I improved in my RESEARCH abilities and I am able to GENRES for different CONTEXTS.