Post 12: Pros and Cons to Peer Reviews

     Peer reviewing provides a chance for students to receive feedback from their peers on an essay they're in the middle of writing, and what elements of it they should improve. This allows students to gain a better sense of what needs work in their papers, along with how they can fix it. Having another student assist in the process of revising a paper can make a student feel more confident in their work and have an easier time improving aspects of it accordingly. At the same time, however, peer reviews can put students in a position where the person recommending changes and revisions may not be correctly doing so. This can lead to a paper's quality being possibly decreased due to unnecessary edits or negative alterations that ruin the structure, flow, or any other integral part of an essay. Not everyone knows how to go about identifying issues in academic writing, so students will likely have to use their own judgement if unsure about what a peer has recommended they do with their essay. Most of the time, a student should be doing this anyway in order to effectively apply a peer reviewer's advice to their paper and prevent themselves from lazily adding changes without thinking. All-in-all, the advantages and disadvantages that come with peer reviewing depend directly on the approach students take to utilizing this process for improving their academic writing. 

Post 11: Five Paragraph Essays

In Bernoff's blog, he gives a lot of information concerning the "five paragraph essay structure," that most students are used to abiding by. In his blog, he gives many tips and techniques that will allow a student to break past this mindset and be capable of upholding their essays to the standards of their professor. In their blog, they bring up techniques that help when trying to avoid limiting an essay with the old habit of including only five paragraphs. In my current Doc2, I have luckily avoided sticking to this method of structuring my paper. However, I  believe the introduction and conclusion of my essay could use more development, as they do not completely fulfill the direction I'm intending to go for. As Bernoff puts it, "The whole point of the opening paragraph is to tell people what's coming," and mine could be revised in a way that emphasizes the thesis more throughout it. 

    With my conclusion, I am notices that it does exactly what Bernoff mentions in his blog when discussing the issues that students have when concluding their writing, which is that, "They tend to write, 'As I said, blah blah blah' which is dull and repetitive." The last paragraph could use structural changes that focus less on what has already been discussed, and more about what the reader should think of afterwards. Including some information concerning how to get started with my major would definitely be more intriguing than just summarizing what I've already said. Lynch's essay gives good insight into making essays less restrictive, which I think I think is very relevant to the issue I have with writing in general. He mentions, "it’s not as if the personal essay and the school essay are diametrically opposed: the former can lead to the latter in interesting and compelling ways." I think this way of thinking would improve parts of my essay to feel more communicative with the audience, considering my essay is meant to be about my major. A balance between this and a more strict approach to something like my introduction or conclusion is what I believe would be the most suitable for improving the essay as a whole.

Post 10: Blog Genre

 The professional blog I follow, SteelKiwi, fits the blog genre, as it focuses on a specific type of content and the sharing of thoughts or explanations. A genre is meant to guide the direction of a form of writing, and guide the writer. Blogs are meant to inform the reader about a subject the writer already knows they're interested in, and provide them with additional information on the topic. SteelKiwi does this well and directly notes that it is about the, "business side of software development." As such, it focuses on using a professional tone that is concise in order to accurately provide the reader with information about software development. This is demonstrated well in that it uses the genre of blogs and modifies it to suit a certain audience and topic. Dirk's essay notes this use of genre in his quote of Carolynn Miller: "a rhetorically sound of genre must be centered on...the action it is used to accomplish." In this case, SteelWiki accomplishes informing the audience of various concerns they may have of business and software development. 

Post 9: Professional Blog Arrangement

How much does it cost to develop an app?

What factors apply to app development cost?

• The design, features, platform, and infrastructure affect the cost.
• Quote: "There are several things that affect typical app development cost: 1. Features and functionality, 2. App types, platforms, and devices, 3. Backend infrastructure and admin functionality, 4. Design." 

What features should be prioritized?

• A login feature should be kept for apps with messaging and chatting. 
• Quote: "A login feature is best for applications that enable private messaging, chats, and loyalty cards."
• There's no need for payment features unless you're selling something in your app.
• Quote: If your app is free to download, you don’t need to integrate any payment gateway."
• A rating feature can help you build trust from consumers in a platform.
• Quote: "One of the ways to control quality and build trust on a platform is through feedback and ratings."
• Include audio and visual features in your app involves social media.
• Quote: "Audio and visual functionality is a good option for social media platforms, allowing users to send audio messages and share media files."

What type of app should you build?

• Native applications provide high performance and complexity capabilities
• Quote: "These apps show a high level of performance and benefit from access to hardware like GPS sensors, cameras, microphones, the touchscreen, and more."
• Cross-platform apps are less complex and more versatile.
• Quote: "They’re best for projects that don’t need to support complex features and platform-specific functionality."
• Native apps are more costly than cross-platform apps.
• Quote: "Developing native apps is more costly, as you need to build an application for each operating system. Cross-platform mobile development is cost-effective since you can use the same code base for iOS and Android."

How important is your app's infrastructure?

• Most apps need good administration and backend infrastructure.
• Quote: "The majority of applications need a backend with APIs that ensures data sharing between the app and a database.

What kind of design should I choose for my app?

• The design of the app depends on how many screens and animations you'll need.
• Quote: "The time spent designing your app can vary greatly based on different factors. It depends first on the number of screens."

What should I be paying for?

• There are many aspects you'll need to pay for, as app development can be expensive. 
• Quote: "App development is a demanding process that includes costs related to each element in an application 一 features, platforms, backend infrastructure, and design."