For this assignment I chose the Process Explanation genre. I began this assignment by thinking about the position of an Early Childhood Intervention Specialist. This is a position I am very interested in pursuing after my graduation in May. At my present job I have had the opportunity to visit with an ECI Specialist who does home visits for one of the children I baby sit. I have had the opportunity to talk with her about the position. One of the aspects of this position is the large amount of travel they do each day. ECI Specialists are reimbursed for some of their expenses and that is how I chose this particular scenario. I felt that this scenario is one that I will encounter on the job. 

 I determined that a process explanation would be the best genre for this scenario. Even though this is a procedure, I wouldn’t exactly classify them as instructions. The Expense Report Process includes some instructions on how to complete the form, but that is only a part of the entire process. My procedure conformed more to process explanation than instructions for that reason. The process explanation genre fit my scenario best because I could describe each stage of how to get your expenses reimbursed, including filling out the expense report form. 

As a part of the job, an ECI Supervisor would prepare written process explanations when training employees in new procedures. I determined my audience to be the Early Childhood Intervention Specialists that I supervise. Prompt reimbursement of expenses would be something important to ECI specialists. To receive reimbursement, employees are required to provide proper documentation promptly and that is why they need to know the details of this procedure. 

Instructions and process explanations do have similarities in that each provide a systematic way of performing a task. Each genre has stages or steps which provide important information to their readers. Instructions are for a specific task where process explanation describes the stages of a procedure. In my scenario I determined the reader of my process explanation to be a supervisor of employees who would need to understand the entire process and not just how to complete the form correctly in order to properly train her employees.  

I think I have mastered some of the course goals after completing this assignment. I have analyzed communication contexts by understanding my audience and the purpose and situation in which an expense report process would be used. When writing this process explanation I was writing specifically to ECI Supervisors who would train employees on how to use the new expense report procedure. I think I have also designed a convincing document that is easy to understand and a form that is user friendly. 

This assignment was interesting in that it caused me to think about a specific procedure that I could actually encounter as an ECI specialist. Each time I read through my process, I put myself in the role of ECI Supervisor and asked myself if I could adequately train my employees to use this process correctly.   PuettProcessExplanation.doc