Reflection on Pre-Production

How did my week working on this project go? Well read on to enjoy the riveting tale of my successes but (mostly) failures!

1) What were some of the successes (or, things that went right) during this week’s process work? Explain, with evidence.

I was successful in narrowing down the project. Previously I hadn't known where to start because there were so many different genre examples that I could possibly use for my rhetorical investigation.

However, I decided that I would focus on the genres that are most relevant to me, a student studying Optical engineering. I feel like  focusing on things that are relevant and interesting to me will allow me to go more deeply into the project.

I ended up choosing popular articles and  academic lectures because when one writes in these genres they often have to appeal to the audience’s different backgrounds using a bunch of the rhetorical strategies that we've talked about in class.

2) What were some of the challenges (or, things that went wrong) during this week’s process work? Explain, with evidence.

The main challenge I had was the only interviews were very very early in the process. I had conducted my interviews before I specified my focus on popular articles and academic lectures. Therefore, I didn’t focus the questions on those genres. This is slightly problematic but I do have enough information for my interviewees to integrate a little of their content into my work.

3) How do you think next week will go, based on your experiences this week?

I think next week will be fairly smooth sailing because I know what I'm going to talk about in my project now and have all the genre examples selected. The hardest part about next week is going to be learning how to use computer software to create a podcast with music and possible interview snippets.

4) How are you feeling about the project overall at this point?

I feel good about this project.  Going into this project, I was more confused than any of the other projects in this class because I thought it was such a strange topic (writing about writing but not the actual research content?). Now that I understand exactly what this project is trying to accomplish and I've made significant steps in achieving the goals by writing an outline and production schedule I'm feeling confident about my ability to produce a rough cut by the end of this week.