Peer Review 9a

As all work moves along, especially in larger projects, it is key to having outside eyes look upon your work to find mistake that you would miss. Peer review is necessary to creating good pieces of writing, which is what I will be doing next in the following section.

I did a peer review for an essay titled Journals Versus Blog Posting: The Rhetoric World of Environmentalism written by Gabby Dietrich, who is in Section 2.

I suggested her a format revision, which would allow her to better fit into the conventions of the essay format and to appropriated present her content in the best way possible.

My form recommendations would help Gabby produced an essay better fit for the college environment, as it would use the conventions of a college essay better and also fall into the level of a formal analysis of the project, instead of staying at the rough draft level, hitting only some of the targets for a college essay.

In the previous project, when the course presented us with materials to avoid passive verb usage and formal writing styles, I really took it to heart, as I saw in Gabby's initial rough draft a few days ago, that her essay suffered from passive writing and informal speech, both of which I suggested directly through language comments and word choice, through Google Documents.

One thing I do really admire from Gabby's work is that she include quotes much more fluently and effectively than I did in my previous essay for project one. Learning how to do that will help me through my entire career and seeing someone accomplish it so adequately give me a perfect example to learn from.

Open Post to Peer Reviewers

    Finally I have arrived with a complete rough draft of my essay. This draft itself has cost me about twelve hours of my life but I'm not done yet. I have already identified a few weaknesses but also strong points of my essay that I will answer in questions below.

A link to my rough draft.

• Key information about your particular project that you would like anyone who peer reviews your draft to know
  - The aerospace engineering field is like many of the STEM fields, it really only has one major genre that professionals write in, the scholarly journal article. When it comes to other forms, they are not as well known, such as the public reports and presentations such as a power point. This means that while I do have only a few genres, it covers a large portion of the field. 
  - Also, I am very interested in space, and sometimes do skip over details that people may not know, and therefore it would be nice to hear from other peers on how the essay reads. 
  
  
• Major issues or weaknesses in the “Rough Cut” that you’re already aware of (as well as anything you’d like to know from your editors about those weaknesses)
  - I know I have a voice that isn't perfectly clear, and I have edited or cut out some of the weaker parts of my essay that break the flow of the video, so it would be nice to hear some obvious complaints or maybe suggestions for transitions between large parts of my essay that would help the flow.  
  - I also know that I did not include the references at the end of the essay, but I would like to hear from my reviewers if I need to include more researched opinions or if the current content that is in the essay is sufficient to support my two genres. 
  - I understand that I skipped over part of my thesis where I mention presentations such as powerpoints are also a genre for this field. At the end of the essay where I reached almost eight minutes, I realized jumping into that topic might make the video drag on and make it worse overall. Would an extra body paragraph section of presentations add to the value of the essay, or is the current content enough?
  
  
• Major virtues or strengths in the “Rough Cut” that you’re already aware of (as well as anything you’d like to know from your editors about those strengths)
  - I believe my main strength in this essay is that the video does match up well with the vocal section of the essay, but I would like to know from the peer reviewers if they would like to have more video, as I see the majority of my essay is photographs, which could be boring after a while. I am curious as to other people's opinion on this bias towards photos. 

Reflection on Video Essay Progress

   Looking back on video essay as a whole now that I have it done, makes me realize all of the work I have just accomplished. Jumping into the genre of a video essay was very difficult for me. Learning how to use Windows Movie Maker, and taking the time to cut together different photos and videos, and also edit photos to include my own text took much longer than I thought it would. To see my answers of reflection my video essay so far, continue reading.

1. What were some of the successes (or, things that went right) during this week’s process work? Explain, with evidence.
   
   
   - One of the main things that surprised me was how much I enjoy editing video. As I said before, it did take me longer than expected to actually put the project together as a whole, but as I am interested in computers, it was a little bit fun to put a video essay together and that made the project much more bearable. Another success was that I was able to slim down the format of my content outline, as I had three body paragraphs with two subjects each, which would have taken a much longer time to create, but also a much longer and drawn out video. As it is, my rough draft is almost eight minutes long with only two of the more important genres of my field included and only a single in depth example of each of them, the Elon Musk story, and the piston theory article within the AIAA journal. But I believe I was successful in starting the project and adaption to new realization and creating a working product in the end. 
   
   
2. What were some of the challenges (or, things that went wrong) during this week’s process work? Explain, with evidence.
   
   
   - As I said before, one big challenge was realizing how long it would take to cut the video together, write the script, pull all of the images and video together, and record the audio. According to my original content outline, it should have taken me roughly the same amount of time to finish three body paragraphs with two examples each, as it did for two paragraphs with one example, approximately twelve hours. However, I also did procrastinate more than I wanted to, and even though I did start a little bit on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, according to my timeline, the bulk of the work was accomplished Sunday morning through afternoon, following my habit of procrastination.
    
3. How do you think next week will go, based on your experiences this week?
   
   
   - I actually think next week will go great if I get good peer reviews, and even if not, I still have good ideas on how to move forward with making my video essay better. I actually enjoy editing the video, and I think next week will be productive. 
   
   
4. How are you feeling about the project overall at this point?
   
   
   - I feel like I have gotten over the hump of scary deadlines on the project, and now I am in the stage where I have to bring the project from a B or C project to an A project through review, peer review, editing, and perfecting my final product. 

Production Report Body Paragraph 2

   Following my previous check up, I have completed my second body paragraph for my upcoming video essay on rhetoric in aerospace engineering. Catching up to my timeline as I fell behind, I will open myself up again to a few questions about my progress, and also compare my content outline to my current raw work.

How did you decide to use form to present your content in the raw material you’ve shared here? How did the conventions of your chosen genre influence your choices?

- The structure of my second body paragraph changed after I finished the first body paragraph, seeing how much time and detail the first section of work actually took. Therefore, since the video essay does dictate that we need matching video or photo content to be relevant to the audio overlaying the video, I spread out my work on the Elon Musk launch background for a much longer time and covered more topic in order to take a more in depth approach to the genre. I covered several different rhetorical devices rather than focusing on just one type of device like I was originally intended on doing. 

How did the production of this raw material go? What kinds of any hiccups, challenges, successes, creative epiphanies, etc. occurred during the process?

- The production of the second body paragraph went much smoother than the first body paragraph, where I was just getting a handle on how to format the body sections properly to make them work for the conventions of the video essay. Therefore, it went much smoother, but still took a lot of time and many re-shoots to make sure my voice was clear enough to understand.

Content Outline Sections 

• Public Report
• Main idea - Reporting to the public is a big part of large companies or big organization with lots of work, as they eventually have to share their successes/failures, and convince people to keep spending for the future. They can also relay educational information, such as presentations designed to generate interest.
• Evidence 1 - Elon Musk Launch Background
• Evidence proves - Just as before, this article shows that context is very important to presenting the public, but instead of coming from a large company, this article comes from Elon Musk himself, as a public report to inspire confidence and provide education in the wake of another attempt to land a rocket.
• Importance - Without the ethos that Elon Musk provides to this article, it would stand out as just another attempt to drum up press for a new rocket. Coming from the entrepreneur himself though, shows the mindset that an aerospace engineer writes within, a logical and well thought out article with education and background to back up claims, similar to a research paper with a public audience, and a section dedicated to the future of his company, as they will keep trying to land their newly designed rockets.

Content Outline Adaptation

 This is a link to the raw footage of the second body paragraph of my work in progress video essay.

Product Report Introduction

    Checking up on the progress of a project is the key to sticking to a previously created timeline or outline. By uploading a section of my video essay's introduction and answering a few questions on that work, I will open my raw work up to the public, and also push myself to get it ready in time before the big deadline, the final due date.

How did you decide to use form to present your content in the raw material you’ve shared here? How did the conventions of your chosen genre influence your choices?

 - By uploading my introduction I am setting the stage for the rest of my video essay. A video essay usually has a sense of ambiguity when starting the video, and my essay is no different. By choosing to start with a few different stories and form them together into a cohesive idea on the importance of writing in aerospace engineering, I am starting the audience off from a knowledge level of zero, and bringing them up to speed with how the rest of the essay will go.

How did the production of this raw material go? What kinds of any hiccups, challenges, successes, creative epiphanies, etc. occurred during the process?

- The production of this raw material went fine, and I actually enjoyed it due to being able to talk about a few historically important and interesting events in my field. During this process though, I also realized exactly how much work it will take to make a video essay, and how much collection of photos, video, recording, and writing a script will actually take in man hours. 

Here is my original Outline Item
 

• Opening: The idea that we are talking about genre
• Idea 1 - Talk about famous aerospace engineers and some of their accomplishments
• Idea 2 - Relate how aerospace advancements help people’s everyday world around them

Here is my Outline Item Adaption 

A link to my introduction for my video essay on aerospace engineering. 

Reflection on Aerospace Genre Video Essay

        As I come to the end of my week of pre-production on my video essay for aerospace genres, I can come back to reflect how far I have come and how much I have left to do. In my previous two posts, I laid out content and a timeline for the content to follow in the next week, which means I know I have plenty of word ahead of me. 

       

       Without any reflection however, I won't be able to learn from my mistakes in the first few weeks of this project, and apply their fixes to the tough production weeks coming up. Learning from mistake is one key skill you must learn going through life. 

       

     Following are a few key questions designed to help me reflect on my previous work for this video essay.

• What were some of the successes (or, things that went right) during this week’s process work? Explain, with evidence.  
• Some of my biggest successes were from our work in class on Tuesday for my English project, where I attained a few ideas for main genres to look for in my own field, and a few concepts on how to analyze them and apply them to my project. This includes the presentation ideas that a few class members brought up in class who were also in scientific fields without much written discourse. 
• Another success I had was realizing exactly how much work the production week coming up will present to me with the timeline I had to create. I've already cancelled plans on Friday in order to free up time to record and write and gather for my video essay, which is going to take up a lot of time. 
• What were some of the challenges (or, things that went wrong) during this week’s process work? Explain, with evidence.
• The main challenge I faced was procrastination, as I didn't start any of the outlines until the due date on Tuesday 3/8/16, as seen on my blog posts. This really hindered how much research I could do before choosing examples for my content outline, and I believe I will have to search for a couple of better examples for my actual essay, especially my second presentation example, as the Virgin Galactic report is more of a public report than a presentation, which will confuse people in my essay if I don't clarify the differences between the two.
• The other challenge I faced was finding significantly different genres to work inside of for my major, aerospace engineering, as I really only learned about scholarly journals through my research and didn't receive too much help from my interviews. This was helped through Tuesdays class though, and wasn't as much of a challenge, as I found public reports and presentation to be different in purpose and genre. 
• How do you think next week will go, based on your experiences this week?
• I think next week will be a lot of work and might turn out horribly depending on my will to stop procrastinating like I did this week. If I procrastinate, I simply will not get it done. 
• How are you feeling about the project overall at this point?
• Overall I am feeling okay about the project, but I am worried about the amount of work that is upcoming until I hit spring break, at that point, I know I can edit it well. 

Production Schedule

     Coming from my last post on the content outline, the next most important thing when planning out anything significant is to lay out a timeline of events or objectives. Even during a nice family vacation you have to plan driving time, places, tickets, and food stops.
 
   Similar to this, in a video essay, I must lay out the scripting writing, recording, cutting time, out into a five day long time frame, in order to accomplish my project by the due date.

Follow my time table by clicking here.

Content Outline

        Every type of project requires a degree of planning and organization. Fun things like big trips, require planning. Planning for big projects, such as my ongoing four week English project requires tons of planning.
      That is why I am posting my content outline for my genre project in my English class, to make sure I have a solid structure for my project and that I will have a plan to layout a timeline that will come further down the road.

For access to my outline, click here.