Peer Review for David Klebosky

I reviewed David Klebosky's "A Quick Look into the Rhetorical Life of a Civil Engineer".


I chose to work on activity 2 because David did not have everything in this draft. I wanted to focus on genre and form because it would still have been early enough to solve the problem without too many casualties.


There were two things I focused on while reviewing David's draft: conventions and tone. First, I know a lot of us have never done a QRG before and I wanted to give my advice on what makes one fit the genre conventions. He had no images or graphics. I gave him advice about how to organize the pages and what Iv'e learned when making my QRG.


The other part came more from the student guide book. I specifically focused on "taking a fresh perspective". David had mentioned about how concerned he was with how his body paragraphs were coming across. I decided to talk about this and how I liked his witty sense of humor.


I admired David's fearlessness to add funny parts in his project. This is something I can not do well because of how little I practiced it so whenever I come across any author or presenter that can do it I always admire it.

Peer Review for Chanler Gillette

I reviewed Chandler Gillette's QRG titled Engineering a Future for Tomorrow's Children. The review process was very helpful for me and I hope it was helpful for Chandler. I saw some things he did well that I'd like to do with my own project and I also saw things I want to avoid, like not having enough pictures.

He posted his rough draft in his blog post here.

I actually did not see that I only had to pick one activity to critique the rough draft with so I did all of them. When I was making my suggestions I focused a lot on the superficial aspects since it is a QRG, I also took into account how clear his purpose is and if he is targeting the audience well enough. He did a great job with the content and delivering it in an interesting way so a lot of the suggestions focused on how to more accurately fit the form.


Since I did the four activities, I think I covered a lot of what can be fixed. Chandler and I have never done a QRG before so I knew he would appreciate more criticism on the genre. I suggested a lot of things like adding pictures and diagrams. I also talked about things like font and text organization.


After reading pages 61 and 62 of the students guide, I wanted to try to focus on things Chandler may not have been concerned with while making the rough draft. I wanted to do this to give a "fresh perspective" on the piece. I knew he would be more concerned with the actual content and points presented so I wanted to focus more on the genre conventions and rhetorical aspects of the text.

I think I admired the fact that Chandler was able to take a somewhat boring subject and make it interesting. I liked how he put a lot of voice into the QRG and I will now try to incorporate that into my own QRG.

Open Post to Peer Review

Here is a rough draft of my QRG. There is still a lot I need to add. Right now I just wanted to focus on the main points being made as the project started off a little confusing for me and I want to make sure I am doing a good job meeting the criteria.


My QRG is meant to be a kind of guide for young neuroscientists to understand the genres in their field better. I use the word "you" and I would like to know if that works for this situation. I have never really used it in my writing before and am unsure if it works.


I think one weakness of my draft is that I am unsure if I organized it well enough. This is my first time making a QRG and it was weird to organize my ideas not in an essay format. I had to play around with where to put what and how much to talk about each topic.


I think one of my strengths is the fact that I have a specific purpose: to help new neuroscientists learn the genres in the field. This made it easier to know what to talk about. I stayed focused on what the reader needs to know. I think by the time the finished project is ready, this will make the QRG very comprehensible and informative.

Reflection on my Rough Draft of a QRG

This blog will reflect on the content generating process of this week. There were some new changes in the process and scheduling of this week, compared to project 1. Analyzing these changes will help me with project 3.


Using a schedule helped a lot. Even though I didn't post the blogs when I scheduled to do them, I still generated the content. This made it a lot easier to create a finished product in a trimly fashion. I did not feel stuck or unsure of what to do next.


The hardest thing this week was deciding how to fit in my examples and evidence (as I still haven't done it). I am still trying to feel out the QRG genre and I want to try different combinations before I decide on now way to present it. This was really the only problem I had this week.


I think next week will be challenging to create a finished product.  Since this is my first QRG I don't have a definite picture of how its supposed to look. I will probably do some more research on different QRG examples to get a better idea. But I think as long as I stick to my schedule I will continue to improve the quality.


Overall, I am feeling good about this project. I feel like I understand what I am talking about very well. This makes generating content a lot easier. If I ever want to change things up a little bit or shift focus, I do not have to worry about getting too caught up in the process of coming up with something to say. That being said, I am considering doing a podcast since I feel I can talk about this topic a lot.

Production Report 2

This post is a continuation of the last post under Production Report.


Outline:

Body section


Each body section will focus on a specific topic. I know I will definitely have sections dedicated to the interviews I conducted. I will most likely place these sections toward the beginning and then have certain sections explaining the different topics that came up in the interview.


Content Generated:

Credibility in a Scientific Journal Publication

This should be the number one quality on your mind when publishing in a scientific journal. The primary goals of any publication is to present your research and, in return, get the attention of potential investors so you can conduct more research.

The scientific journal should be viewed as a marketplace you can advertise yourself on and the customers are the potential investors. Like a car salesman trying to sell an inadequate car, researchers who stray away from the content of their research may give the impression that they are overselling themselves in order to compensate for inadequate research.

Trying to appeal to the investors emotions will not work because you are essentially selling to a company making a business decision. In a scientific journal, the article being published should give the investors a first impression of “quality research”. The next step is using power point presentations to close the deal.

This part of the QRG was a little bit trickier than the intro. I think I still need to experiment on how to organize the paragraphs. I have not written a QRG before so I was not familiar with how to break up the content. 

Overall, I was happy with what I produced. I felt like I stayed focused and did not stray to far away with what I am trying to say. One of the dilemmas I had was whether or not to repeat why understanding these genres are important. I do not want to seem repetitive but I want to explain why its important. 

Production Report

This week was the process of transforming outline content into useable content. Here is one section I worked on this week.

Outline section:

Opening section

My genre is a QRG. My first section should focus on capturing the attention of the reader and explain what the QRG is going to be about. The length should be minimal, while still satisfying its purpose.



Content generated:

In the competitive community of science and research, it is crucial to understand the platforms and genres in which researchers publish their work. Specifically, in the field of neuroscience. While it would be worth while to familiarize yourself with all the possible genres available, the three most important and widely used genres today are power point presentations and scientific journal publications.

When making this content I focused on the points detailed in my outline. Using the QRG genre, I knew I could do this because the readers of QRG are generally reading through the text quickly and looking for main points of each section.

Keeping this in mind, I enjoyed not having to worry about the heavily structured introductions I'm used to writing in college essays. I did not have too much trouble figuring out what to say because I feel like I know the points I'm trying to make. 

Reflection on my Process

This blog is going to be a reflection on this pre-production phase. I will examine what went wrong and what went right. hopefully by doing this I will know what to do better next time.


The main things that went right last week were the interviews. i was very happy with the content I was able to get out of my interviewees. This also helped me conduct my research, as I knew what to look for more.


One of the hardest things about this project was deciding which genre to use. I wanted to do a podcast because I had voice recordings for the interviews but I think I could format the message better in a QRG. This actually ended up working out in the end because I asks my interviewees a lot of questions in case I decided to take a different route.


After making the schedule, I have a lot more confidence in the next couple weeks. I am more confident with the content I gathered, especially from by interviews. I think this will make the production week a lot easier.


Honestly, I am still a little nervous because I have never really written about a topic like this, However, I am pretty confident in the research I've done and the content I have from my interviews. I think as long as I stick to my schedule and do not procrastinate, I will be able to produce a good project 2.