Look Back At It

Short Assignment 1 revolved around genre translation. The goal of this assignment was to convince somebody to try your favorite hobby. In my case, I chose surfing. We were told to convince people in two different ways. I chose to write an essay and use text messages to convince a friend. The first of the two class outcomes that we focused on during this assignment was being aware of your audience and talking to them in a way that is appropriate for what you are trying to convince them to do and understanding who your audience is. The second class outcome that was focused on in this assignment was actually outcome 3. We were to be considering the stakes and outcomes of the piece of work and how genre and audience can affect your writing.

Below is my revised version of this assignment and linked below is my very first draft. I actually made a lot more revisions than were suggested on this one. My first draft of this assignment was very shallow and held little to no meaning behind it. After not looking at it for a few months then coming back to it at the end of the quarter, I realized I barely wrote anything of meaning. I didn’t explain anything or focus on either of course outcomes. I was just writing to write. Outcome 1 really emerged in my final draft when I started to think from the perspective of someone who has never surfed. I started to ask myself what they would want to hear about surfing, because at the end of the day, it was about convincing the audience to surf, not further strengthening my love for it. I think I did a pretty good job at convincing over text so I tried to incorporate some of that same casual energy into my final draft. Surfing is not a serious subject and I needed my audience to understand that. If I was on the border of whether to try surfing or not and I was going to read an article, I wouldn’t want to read a long boring essay about the fundamentals of it. I would be more interested in listening to the author sort of have a conversation with himself/herself so that is what I did. Audience and genre had a pretty big impact on my second draft essay structure.

On top of that, I cut out a significant portion of my audience within the first few sentences. What was I thinking!? This is where I really focused on Outcome #3 which is thinking about how genre and audience can affect the structure of my writing. Obviously, my text messages to my friend were more casual than my essay. But, are they really that different besides the punctuation and grammar? To be quite honest, the main point of both of them is to convince my audience to try surfing for the first time so they really were not that different when it came to effectiveness. In the first few sentences of my mini essay, I chose to say, “Obviously there are people out there who want nothing to do with the ocean or standing up on a surfboard. And if you are stubborn and don’t want to even give it a try then this passage probably won’t break down that brick wall.” Right away, I was cutting people out I didn’t need to cut out. I wasn’t aware of my true audience. On top of me starting with a counter argument which is not good, I also contradicted this statement at the end by saying everyone should try surfing and anyone can do it. The second part of outcome 3 is focusing on how genre can affect organization and structure. During my first draft, I clearly was not thinking too much about genre, but after revision, I really focused on my writing having a purpose. Rather than just telling people to surf because it is fun, it clears your head, and is calming, I went forward and explained why each of those were true. You can see all of this being done right below!

Above you can see professional surfer John John Florence(JJF) locking in before a free-surf at Rocky Point as the sun goes down. Just like this class had many obstacle for me, JJF has had many obstacles in his career including a broken leg and a torn ACL. You can really relate anything to surfing and that is what I tend to do to keep myself engaged.

Final Draft:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HFZZe07ig5jMF-ZIBtrb2GgzyR-n88C15SzNPIfqIIo/edit?usp=sharingLinks to an external site.