Reflection on Project 1

Writing a QRG was a difficult task because of the amount of research that had to be done and then compacted into a few pages of summaries and graphics. I enjoyed the final product. The creativity of the project was a departure from traditional essay. Being able to add images was a fun and added another level of communication to the final product! Overall, writing a QRG was difficult but fun.

Francisco, Leland "Reflection [Explored]" 07/03/2010 via flickr.org Attribution 2.0 Generic

• What challenges did you face during the Quick Reference Guide project and how did you deal with them?
• I faced the challenge of consolidating all of my sources into palatable summaries while finding places to insert hyperlinks that makes the most sense for the reader. I dealt with them by linking once to source and then referencing the source in the following summaries. For consolidating my sources, I tried to focus on specific subject and pull from all sources to maximize the amount of information provided to the reader in a simple summary.
• What successes did you experience on the project and how did they happen?
• Using subheading that related to who, what, when, where, why and how about the debate really helped organize my thoughts and my summary of the QRG. By using these subheadings, I wasn't repeating myself as often and allowing myself to let the reader remember information and people from above because with these simple heading they could always refer back to that particular portion of the QRG.
• What kinds of arguments, rhetorical strategies, design choices and writing practices did you find the most effective for your project? Why?
• I used ethos as a rhetorical strategy to get my readers to engage in the writing because it helped draw them into a subject that isn't extremely emotional but rather distant. My subject was an argument over mathematical proofs, so drawing on my ability to describe, I made this argument have an emotional aspect to as too let the reader become attached to the scientists who created the proofs instead of the proofs.
• What kinds of arguments, rhetorical strategies, design choices and writing practices did you find were not effective for your project? Why?
• I found that using paragraphs to explain the timeline of debate was effective because the wall of text it left was imposing. Instead I used bullet points and bolded dates to explain the order in which events took place. This made the essay more skimmable and bogged down the reader less in walls of text.
• How was the writing process for this project similar to other school writing experiences you’ve had in the past?
• Finding sources from scholarly databases was a similarity between my other writing assignments in high school. While I have never written about math or physics in an English paper I have used JSTOR to find scholarly articles about the subject I am writing about.
• How was the writing process for this project different from other school writing experiences you’ve had in the past?
• All of my papers in grade school were essays with the basic introduction, body paragraph and conclusion. The QRG was a multimedia, summary of ten different sources that was meant to educate an ignorant individual about an extremely complex subject. Not only educate the reader but provide your own opinion about the subject through subtle language selections and provide the reader with both sides of the subject with little bias. This was a very involved writing assignment and its use of graphics was the greatest difference from my other writing experiences.
• Would any of the skills you practiced for this project be useful in your other coursework? Why or why not?
• Since I am majoring in mechanical engineering, writing does not have a heavy emphasis in our class schedules but professors still expect coherence in lab reports. So, having the opportunity to practice writing and be graded on my writing lets me know where I need to improve. Also, my use of blogger and google docs has allowed me to learn about these two programs and will allow me to collaborate easier with groups as I move through college. 

Edit:
I commented on Mark and Scott's blog posts. After reading Scott's reflection, I realized taking a more analytical approach to my QRG might be a better path to writing a paper about a subject by summarizing and tying together a bunch of different sources. Scott also brought up that he struggled getting all the little assignments done throughout the week so he wasn't cramming it all in on Saturday and I am going to try to do a better job of spacing out the assignments across the week throughout project 2.  My reflection was very similar to Mark's especially when it came to compromising explanation for brevity in the QRG. Each subheading of mine had so much information that explaining it all would compromise the most essential convention of a QRG which is brevity. Using graphics and hyperlinks, I maintained brevity through my QRG just like Mark did.