Overall Reflection

During my conference this week I was able to get some great insight to help me take this paper up a few levels. It also could not have come at a better time for me due to the fact that I missed the previous day due to the flu. At first I was a bit confused on some of the aspects and possibly missed on a few major points such as adding plenty of personal information and stories that help give the reader a picture. Hopefully by adding those personal touches the reader will have a chance to connect with me more. I also did not use very many adjectives, and my paper is about a topic that is so lively and exotic there should be. So I went in and added these things to attempt to paint more of a picture for the reader's eyes. The next big thing I was told was to keen in on one genre, dive reports, and be specific rather than be very general about several genres. I took out 2 paragraphs about 2 genres and now basically just talk about the dive reports, and even added some quotes from one of my own. My favorite part about this paper and topic is that I was able to keep using this passion of diving in my project 2 and 3 as well.

Today after meeting with Mat I feel much better about the direction of my paper. At first I was uncertain about how I was going to talk about genres in such a hands on and active field, I was not sure that an event such as a lionfish derby could even be considered a genre. So learning that was a major step for me in the right direction. In the conference I was also given some tips on certain places where paraphrasing would be better than just citing, as well as tweaking the structure and placement of a couple paragraphs that made it flow in a much smoother direction. I think that after this meeting I have all of the tools to create a very sound and factual research paper and can hopefully generate an answer to the question I am trying to solve.

The process for this project began with thinking of the best and easiest available genres I could create, so people would actually have a chance to view these. Once I was given the go ahead from Mat in my elevator pitch I hit the ground running with a Prezi. In the Prezi I talk about what the goals of these genres are for me and how they can be accomplished. I talk about what derbies are and how to get involved. The topic of commercial fishing and restaurants beginning to serve the lionfish is mentioned as well. I also included ways for the average person to get involved and links for them to gain new information about this topic. Once I completed this I began on my next genre, the Twitter profile. I made this under the handle @LionfishRemoval. I was able to gain a couple followers very quickly and tweeted out several facts then shared my Prezi on there, as well as my last genre which is a poster/image. The poster is basically encouraging the everyday person to begin eating lionfish and hoping that more restaurants will begin to serve it.

My hopes after this class is that I will be able to take all of the things I learned this year such as the chapters from the BBG, the papers, and different points of view from me fellow classmates and can use this in my future endeavors at FSU and my future career and life. I believe that this classes lessons and projects will stay with me because I was always able to work on and write about things that are close to me and I have a passion for.

This year in ENC-2135 I feel that I have come a long way from not being positive about what exactly a genre in this class meant to creating 3 of my very own from a community I became involved with. It has been a bittersweet year with ups and downs in the class for myself, but I know that I am coming out and much better writer than I did when I entered in January. Let's begin with project 1.