So in this English I came into the class nervous because English has always been one of my worst subjects in school. So my first English class I took freshman year was pretty easy and I was happy with my performance. Compared to this class it has been a little more complicated with more work added and more complicated assignments. We have done two main projects in this class so far, the profile and the photo caption group assignment. The profile was very interesting to me because I was able to profile one of my best friends and was able to tell his story through my eyes. I think that the story I was able to tell with the profile was something that a lot of different college students could read and feel some type of connection to it. But with the photo caption group project I feel as if we as a group were able to really come together and put a very well done project together. We were able to take social media and split it up into completely different subjects but still create a project that complimented each other. So by being able to do this I feel as if my writing has already improved by so much in the first 6 to 7 weeks of this course.
As for what the Activist is I have an understanding that it is a place where amateur writers such as myself have a chance to put their writing out there for other college students to read. Even if it’s not the best writing, people won’t care because they know these are other college students just like them and everybody has learning curves when it comes to writing. Writing isn’t something that people can just be amazing at right away, it takes a deep understanding of the English language to really become a great writer. As for a discourse community this is where people can come together to write about certain things and they all pick a certain genre. Now people might think of genre as fiction or nonfiction, but for this example genre can be almost anything because it stands for what you are talking about and what your subject is. This allows you to have a variety of options when it comes to thinking of something to write for the community because you can pick something that really interests you and maybe a lot things haven’t been written about that topic. So it allows for you to be unique and let people really see who you are as a writer. So the things we have done to relate to the discourse community and genre are the projects we have done so far. The profile was something that people could read in a certain subject but if they didn’t want to read a profile they could have easily gone onto another part of theActivist and read about something else if they wanted. As for the genre portion the photo caption project really ties into that because it allowed us to pick whatever we wanted to talk about and how we wanted to do it. This freedom allows us to make an even better project because we have the freedom to do what we want so we won’t get bored with a topic that someone else assigned to us. That’s how we can relate our projects to the discourse community and genre in this class. That’s what we have done so far in this class and I am looking forward to seeing what else we will be doing as the semester moves on.
Dru Smith 