EProsnie+UFG+Reflection

The Unfamiliar Writing Genre assignment was definitely a tough assignment for me to do. I do not know if I would pick to do a play review again. That has less to do with the writing experience then with the process before it though. My main problem and concern with this is assignment is that I did not actually get to see a play. Plays, especially this time of year, are not easy to come by. I do not have a lot of extra money so a professional play was not really an option for me, and high school plays are often done in November and April of the school year. I was all set to see a play at Eastern this past Friday when I had a family emergency with my Gramma and was forced to return home and help out my family for the weekend. Luckily, I have been involved in theatre since I was in high school and had DVDs of past performances. I decided to review a play that I was not in because I did not want to be biased. I was however, still a little bias considering this was my old high school and I personally knew the actors of the play. I think that if I was able to, seeing another play live would have made for a better experience, but I think I did the best with what I had. Writing the review itself was not as hard as I thought it would be. It was difficult to get into the voice that is require for play reviews, but after that it seemed relatively easy. Since I have been involved in plays and understand the fundamentals I really did not have much problems with assessing the aspects of the play that reviews require. It was definitely a different experience then I thought it was going to be. Prior knowledge definitely helped me out, but I still needed to look a lot up and work my way up from there. I think that I would have preferred writing the user’s guide after writing my final review instead of before. I can see how the annotated bibliography could be an useful resource for writing the paper. However, I think that it was really hard and kind of silly to write a “how to guide” on something we’ve never done before we did it. I found myself making a user’s guide from my sources without really knowing what I needed in it. Then when it came time to write my review I was trying to use my user’s guide as guidance but it just ended up being a jumbled mess. I decided to ignore my guide, and just use my resources. It was then that I was able to write a coherent and to the point review. I then went back after actually writing the review and changed my entire guide to fit what I actually did. It made the doing the first guide seemed like a waste of time. I think it makes more sense to actually do the assignment and then explain how to do it afterwards. All in all I enjoyed this assignment and I think that writing outside my comfort zone helped me to grow as a writer. I think that in the future I may try to do a genre that is a little more accessible to me, but I believe that under the circumstances I did the best that could do. In general, I am happy with the way my review turned out.