Learning Outcome: Reaserch Genre Production

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The important aspects of these assignments are that when I wrote them, they were the first time I was not just writing for myself or my professor, but for an audience. This may be an oversimplification, but this learning outcome essentially means the ability to write different stuff. It is a common occurrence in writing, no matter what that writing is, that a person has to write in a specific, way, with a specific organization, for a specific audience, and to produce a specific effect. That is exactly what I did for these two assignments. I had written about the sources I had collected before when I did my research proposal, but then I was writing almost entirely for myself. When I said something, I knew all the context, information and reason behind it. Unless my memory was failing me, I knew exactly what I meant. That was not the case for either of these assignments. For the CARS paragraph, I had to explain the complexities of the NFL fanbase, landscape, the NFL draft, and scholarly research, all in a way that someone who might know nothing of football could not only understand but expect. I had to say what I said in a way that befitted a research paper, in a way that could be digestible to the reader. It was a very similar situation with the literature review. In my research proposal, I was writing for myself and for my professor. I was taking complex research and breaking it down mostly for me, so I could use it in my paper. Yet here, I was writing for a general audience, not just myself where could understand the research and the whole conversation around it, including what I thought of it. This meant a lot of drawn-out steps and analysis. I had to highlight every detail that was necessary explicitly, whereas for myself I just had much of it in my memory. However, the reality is that I am not special in any way in this regard. It is just the genre I needed to write. Like with the CARS paragraph, when people read a research paper, they expect to understand what's going on, and so for me that means writing a long, drawn out literature review. Despite all I have said, I think I can say I didn't have many problems with this outcome. I think this is because this is something I understood intuitively even before going into this course. I have written all types of genres in the English classes that came before this, even if I did not understand what I was doing the way I do now. That is why I think this outcome is kind of dumb in this way. I mean if you can even get to this course, one would hope you know how to write within audience expectation. Regardless, I think I have definitely learned some stuff at least. I don't know how much I will use it in the future, but at the very least I am more aware.