On The Move

Griffin McKenzie

ENC 2135-0141

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Final Reflection

For project one I decided to write about my experience in high school cross country in track and describe how the community changed during the years I was there. I enjoyed this project, as I am especially good at writing using my own experiences and the project also allowed me to reflect upon a situation I haven’t thought about in a while. As I reflected I noticed my passion for running tended to gradually deteriorate each year I ran cross country for my high school team. As talked about in my project, my freshman year was great. The adolescent leadership was great, and so was the coaching staff. Running is a tough sport, so it helps to have all the positive encouragement you can get. After my freshman year, no one stepped up to the leadership spot that the graduated seniors held. In project one I described how this change in leadership, kind of hindered my passion for running and disrupted my performance on the track. As I stated before, it was nice reflecting on this issue and I learned a lot about the respected genre required for project one.

                Then there was project two. Project took me a while to understand. I had to keep asking Matt what the hell he meant by a genre. Before this class, I thought genre only applied to basic arts such as music, painting/drawing, and acting/ screen production. After the twelfth-time hearing, it I was finally starting to understand what he meant by genre, and thus was able to narrow down a topic. I figured I would write about the Leach community, as it is a community I was interested in joining. When I first started doing my research I couldn’t find a lot of the things I was keeping my eyes peeled for in the Leach. I was looking for motivational posters and posters with health promotions, as this is the kind of things that are typically expected to appear in such a fitness community. These genres were not too heavy within the Bobby Leach center, so I decided to look for other useful genres. That is when I discovered that using the dialogue of regular members might be effective for my argument in Project Two. With this idea at hand, and with a boost from my interviewee and long time fellow gym-member William McKenzie, I decided to focus my argument on the issue of dieting and dietary supplement use within the Leach community. William reminded me of this issue and was able to provide me with some helpful ways to seek out more information on the respected topic. With this information I started to do a little bit of eaves dropping during my workouts at the Leach. With my article research and information collected through ground research and interviews, I was able to conclude that supplement use is to be mixed with a healthy diet, and if used too much, it can cause immune disfunction. I began to appreciate project two once I got through all the bullshit and had a finished piece. I now understand that this assignment will not only teach the audience a little bit about the issue of dietary supplements, but it also taught me a lot and improved my writing technique.

                Project three was a breeze and relatively enjoyable. What I did for my three genres required for project three was create a pdf poster posted on twitter which had a link to a blog post (also posted on twitter). Then I wrote a thankyou not to the man that taught me all about fitness in the beginning of my journey, Michael. I was able to create an effective graphic with basic knowledge about health and exercise which also provided a noticeable link to my blog. Then my blog expanded on the issues presented on the poster.

                Overall, I not only enjoyed Matt’s class, but I learned a lot about my writing research-based genres and myself as a writer. I found that the subjects to choose from for each project were broad, in turn allowing a lot of room for individualization. I got a lot out of each required project. I also did not mind the blog posts that were due throughout the semester, as they were typically based on the Bedford Book of Genres, which is easily the most effective English textbook I have ever laid my eyes on. Matt made the class fun and interactive, making it a lot easier to show up at eight in the morning twice a week