Everyone in this class has organized and drafted documents as well as given presentations either for school or outside purposes. Chapter 8 goes into detail of how to prepare a draft and outlines, and how to follow both to help keep thoughts organized. Looking at the summaries, which have the step by step process (e.g. six moves in an introduction), throughout the chapter helps me keep on track and serves as a guide while writing.
From reading the chapter and reviewing the concepts of making a draft makes me think of what I was told when I first started writing; tell the audience what you are focusing on, talk about the focus, then summarize, by retelling them what you spoke about earlier. The more exciting you make the topic sound the more interested the audience; either secondary or tertiary, will be.
From this chapter, I learned about the different genres, analytical and procedural, that I have been previously overlooking. I hadn’t paid attention to the order of information, I never built up or worked off procedural steps; I just took off with the assignment and started writing. After going through the examples and realizing the patterns that I have been looking at, from school and also other documents, official letters, and reports that are non school affiliated, I can see how they link in the familiar outlines, which was just explained in the reading.
The chapter’s section on making the PowerPoint slides was also very informative and provided a lot of useful details. We all have used PowerPoint to make a presentation, but very few of us look at an outline before creating it. While sitting through numerous presentations and being lost from what the group was trying to convey, I wish that the presenter had seen this chapter before laying out their slides. I feel that most people have been taught to add pictures, graphs and a few lines of text and that’s sufficient. Not having any guidelines doesn’t give the audience the ability to build a firm understanding and keep and interest in the topic. If an audience is aware of what the topic is and the guidelines are followed by the presenters, there is a better chance that more audiences will be attracted to a visual aid. Now that I have a guide to follow, I plan to make my presentations more appealing to my audiences.
Overall, this chapter clearly explained how to use genres and guidelines to better organize thought processes. Through this newly gained knowledge, I know that my documents and visual aids will be more firmly constructed and easier to follow for the audience to grasp my gathered information. This chapter built on the previous two, and as a whole, the three chapters give insight into how to reach specific audience members and present with a more direct and familiar layout.
Genres in our Heads
I bet you hadn’t necessarily been overlooking the different genres described in the reading, you probably just didn’t consciously know you were classifying things you were writing based on your own genre criteria in your head. I think we all do this. While I do agree that using genres may help a novice writer create a successful document, most of us just begin writing with our own organizational pattern in mind. As you said, you just ‘took off and started writing.’ While it may have felt this way, I’m sure there was some organizational pattern in your head that you were following.
Using PowerPoint to create better outlines.
Zebulon, I follow exactly what you are saying about how some people use PowerPoint slides in presentations, but do not really use an outline to make it better. Before reading this chapter I never really thought of using PowerPoint to create an outline. If you think about it that would be one of the easiest ways to create an outline because you could arrange each slide to have a certain idea or topic. I think this method of creating an outline would be much more useful, and handy when writing or creating a presentation because instead of using word and creating bullet points and things of that nature you could incorporate pictures and things like that to help you collect your thoughts and ideas.