My first thoughts about this paper were that it didn't have its own genre. It was a just a paper about a topic and so I was confused on what I was supposed to be doing because there were no set of techniques I could follow. Am I arguing, persuading, describing, I really wasn't sure but it ended up including a few different genres of writing. I had to describe the scene and the text and argue and persuade to prove my point.

 

This paper was about how changing the medium changed the audience and why. Seems simple enough and straight forward, however my interpretation of this statement changed throughtout the process of this paper. The first draft started with me just comparing the basics of how movies were different from books and then just mentioning Harry Potter. For example books had words movies had pictures, very general and not related that much to HP. After turning that in the morning of the day it was due and then having a class discussion I realized I was doing everything wrong. Instead of being general I had to focus on Harry Potter and pinpoint specific examples.

 

For my second draft I swore I knew what I was doing because of the notes I took during the class discussion. I compared the characters in the scene and how by changing the medium the characters changed and therefore it changed how the audience was affected (emotionally). I did this by decribing the physical and plot differences. After writing and printing this draft the morning that it was due I went into my conference and was basically told I was doing good but I had a way to go. The feedback I got was mostly about adding more general information (about movies and books like I did in SFD) and relating everything to my argument, which I thought (at the time) was movies wanted to scare people (hence a devious Tom) and books gave information (hence a calmer Tom). (I realized later on that was a poor argument and overall the second draft was crap, but my teacher was just to nice to say and so I walked away thinking I did an awesome job.) 

 

I didn't understand what I was really doing until the third draft where I actually started to analyze why there were these differences, but I was still very confused at times about what I was doing. I added only what my teacher told me to (because I didn't get any critical feedback from my peer review), relating everything to the argument that made sense to me at the time, as well as talking about the specific audiences in more detail and thoroghly descrining my "so what". I started this draft actually a few days before it was due to give me time to ask for feedback which made me realize how valuable it can be. The grade I recieved for this draft was a B-, (I'm still not sure how to feel about this because I'm used to numbers, so not sure if this is good or bad), but it came with so many comments about similar things (too much plot not enough analysis and relating to argument).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

In my final draft I finally understood what the assignment really was, which made me understand more about media. In the final draft I removed all the plot related content, used all the comments I recieved and instead analyzed what really made the scenes different, the technical aspects of the media. Certain types of people (audiences) will pick up a movie or a book not necessarily for the content but just because it's a movie or a book. They prefer it because of the technical aspects, such as music and videos or text on a page. Also they way in which these technical aspects are used can change the way a message can be interpreted and by a certain audience. Therefore the message and the audience change with the medium and both should be condisdered when constructing a message. This became my new argument and "so what" and what I learnt about writing from this assignment. 

 

Overall going through this paper I learnt how to trace an idea (argument) though a paper in order to prove/convince one that your points are valid, which helped me for the paper 2.