For our final project, me and my group member, Maryna, chose to focus on raising awareness regarding graffiti and street art around the world. We chose this topic to show our readers that that graffiti and street art is mostly viewed by the public as an act of destruction by the individuals who paint them on street walls. We wanted to explain that this is not always the case when it comes to street art in all its forms. Street art such as graffiti, large murals and sometimes tagging can beautify certain areas in neighborhoods and tourist attraction locations.
We chose two distinct genres to approach or topic, which is a genre for a general audience, and a genre for a professional-based audience. For the general-based audience, we chose to write an opinion piece in a magazine. We chose this genre because we wanted to reach our general audiences in a way where we could explain our cause, our views of our chosen topic, and why it is important for people to understand the important of graffiti in our environment. For our second genre, which is a professional-based genre, we chose to write a case study. We chose this genre due to it being an important choice for our topic where we wanted to reach a more professional or an authoritative audience to convince or explain how graffiti can be beneficial in different cities in the world. We gave examples of cities that embraced graffiti and street art and created official policies to manage graffiti rather that simply removing them.
When we first started our project, we decided to each focus on one genre because we believed that consistency was important for this project. We both outlined what we thought each genre should focus on for our organization. For our first drafts, we were struggling with organization our ideas in each of our genres. For instance, for our case study genre, we wanted our case study to concentrate on the different legal policies around the world regarding the management and the laws toward street art, and more specifically, graffiti. For our first draft, me and my partner did not point out each country/city general and governmental policies toward the management of graffiti. For our final draft, on the other hand, after further research toward each country’s legal background evolving graffiti, we were able to provide more detail about each of them in a sensible manner.
Planning and doing our presentation went by smoothly, thankfully, due to not work on this project alone. My group partner was very helpful, and we were easily communicating with each other during the entire project that we were working on. Of course, deadlines made the whole process together for us to to each taking other classes at for our summer session, but we somehow we were able to manage and do as best as we could do for our group project. Both genres were written and edited multiple times until we were confident enough to preset our project to our class.
Practicing analyzing different genre texts using DOCSV made everything easy to analyze the whole semester. When I first got introduced to DOCSV, I admit I was very intimidated and thought that it would make analyzing texts a bit more complicated. But after multiple practicing using the genre toolkit provided, I realized that DOCSV is an important tool to always remember and use for future genre analysis of texts.
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