Project 1 First Draft

***My first draft is completely different from my last draft. I changed my topic because after going to the conference, you helped me realize that I hadn’t used the right prompt, nor had I correctly understood the prompt. After the conference, I realized I needed to write about something different, something that would better fit along with the prompt, so that is why my two drafts are so drastically different***

During my time in high school, perhaps one of the most meaningful things I was a part of was the Beta Club at my school. Beta Club is a club that focuses on getting students involved in not only their schools, but also the larger communities around them as well. The biggest and most important goal of Beta Club is to help people through volunteer service. This discourse community is a community that is very important to me but also a community that uses genres and specifically agreed upon conventions to communicate with each other as a group as well as with the larger public community. This organization had many different outlets in many places which meant that our group had very deliberate and legitimate implications in society which further meant we needed to always be organized and able to communicate effectively.

Beta Club communicated through various means and through those means, they effectively spread information and news, and through doing that well, they impacted the community around our school in positive ways. The genres Beta Club have are incredibly numerous and include a wide range of different categories. For example, Beta Club often communicated to society and the people in our city with volunteer service. This was the largest and most significant way we, as a club, communicated. Through doing many different types of service such as cleaning public areas, donating various items, working with kids and the homeless, and just volunteering time with people in the community, Beta Club used conventions that the people around us understood. However, there were many ways that we needed to get information out so that these volunteering events could be found out about, by both the people volunteering and the people that would be accepting the volunteering.

Beta Club also used modes such as text messages, flyers, and internet posts on sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. In this way, Beta Club communicated with not only the students involved in Beta Club but with our entire town. The used these genres to voice opinions but also to promote the group and the groups separate events. The Beta Club is a very large group, and the high school I was at had one of the highest numbers of students involved. Therefore, it was important for the club to communicate effectively to such a large group of people so the whole club would run smoothly.

The biggest way Beta Club communicated was through spoken genre, and this mainly took place through monthly meetings. At these meetings, the president, vice president, secretary, sponsor, and other various officers would all speak to the group as a whole. These meetings would be the main way information was given out to the large group that made-up Beta Club. The meetings would start out with some updates about the club itself. This included students sharing about all the events that had already happened recently, and then details about the outcome and success or failure of those events. Then the student leaders would begin to talk about the upcoming events. This would be followed by a chance for the students in the main group to come sign up to volunteer at the events on paper. After everyone had signed up, the schedules would be sent to our club site so everyone could see when and where they had signed up.

Another genre that was incredibly useful to Beta Club was a texting service called “Remind101.” With this service, anyone in the group was given a code, and they would text that code to a certain number which would essentially enter them into that group. Then, the person in charge of the texting, usually our president, could send out reminding texts whenever it was necessary and those texts would all be received by the students phones. This “Remind101” service was perhaps one of the most effective and beneficial genre Beta Club utililzed because it could quickly and simply send out any necessary information to a very large group. It was also nice because it was something that did not require a lot of work. For example, if Beta Club had chosen to instead, gather everyone’s emails, that would have been a much more time consuming and tedious process, especially because Beta Club had over three hundred active members. With “Remind101” however, most of the work was put on each individual student to simply just text a certain number a code.

The other big genre Beta Club used to communicate was website and app, Socrative. Socrative is a classroom geared app that allows you to people to post on the site and in that way, get information out to large groups. This was used when Beta Club needed to get lots of information out to the group that could not be simply sent out in one text. Students would create an account and then could log in anytime necessary to see information about events and meeting. It also served as a forum of sorts for any questions the students had. Overall, through the use of both “Remind101” and Socrative, Beta Club communicated well with each other as a group and this effective communication lead to the club being successful.

However, Beta Club also had to communicate well with the people we were volunteering for, and this aspect of the club was perhaps more important than just communicating inside the group. Every separate event Beta Club took part in each had its own unique and different genres that were involved. One of the biggest events Beta Club took part in was Relay for Life. Relay for Life is a big fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. The actual Relay can take place in many different forms. For my high school, each club that wanted to be a part of it had to fundraise in any way they wanted for a couple months and all the fundraising led up to a day where all the clubs would literally take turns walking around our football field for twenty-four hours. While the people were walking, all the separate clubs would continue to fundraise in different ways. Beta Club choose to fundraise in many different ways. Some members made cookies to sell, while others made up games for people to play for a price. It was also important that we reached out to and interacted with sponsors in our areas to ask for free things to sell. For example, often, we would ask restaurants and local businesses to give us deals or even free items that we could then in turn, use to fundraise.