Tuesday, January 19, 2016

January 19, 2016- What I Learned Today

What a fantastic surprise! I have returned for yet another blog post. At this rate I'll become a regular blogger again since never. This post is one of the posts that has been commissioned by my professor with the title-topic, "What I learned in Boating School is..." er...I mean, "What I learned in class today was: ". Just like our grand hero of childhood, Spongebob, I'm drawing a blank. My response from third grade all those years ago in response to the same question seems to be the same, "I don't know. Nothing I guess." I've never tried to catalog what I knew before a class began and compare it to what I know after a class. At this point, yes, I'm stalling. Hoping that a spark of inspiration will hit me as I write, as I learned sometimes happens from the last class, will hit me. Ah, there it is. "The audience is the most important thing to consider when writing a paper." Or...at least...that's what i believe the message was. Our professor wrote on the white board a list of things to consider when writing a paper. This list included genre, audience, purpose, and a few more things I can't recall, but those aren't important for the purpose of this post. At the top, our professor  wrote genre followed by audience. If memory serves right, then his reasoning is that the genre is usually seen as the most crucial thing to consider when writing a paper. My professor disagreed to this by saying that it should be the audience that decides the outcome of the paper and not the genre. He argued that If you can narrow your audience, such as the freshman math majors who live in a dorm on campus, you can narrow the options of what medium and genre to write in. For the example given above, a flyer could work very well if the purpose is to welcome them to the dorm. Perhaps a math riddle would work as well if the purpose is to give something for them to do. Ultimately, your choice in medium and purpose is initially decided upon by the selected audience. I can't say I fully agree with him just yet. I am a skeptic so a change in convention is destined for my scrutiny but he raised a good point. I will certainly keep my eyes open for the truth of this argument and also keep my mind open if I find more reasons to believe this argument rather than discredit it.

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