Transitioning from the Inquiry Based Research essay to the Composition project involved my audience more than my research. When I was attempting to tell my audience my research question, which was that there is an effect on the public health when parents do not vaccinate their children, I struggled with creating the best genre to convey my message. I decided to keep the same audience from my research essay, because parents of unvaccinated children are creating an epidemic of the spread of infectious diseases. I knew they would not react to a simple list of harms created by not vaccinating, because these parents have already heard information about vaccines. Since doctor’s logic is not enough to persuade these parents, I created satirical and emotional genres to evoke a sense of understanding and empathy. The genres are intertwined with my audience. Had my audience been doctors, I likely would not have chosen a political cartoon or poster with facts that doctors already know. I wanted to make an association in my political cartoon (not wearing a seatbelt relating to not receiving a vaccine) that parents had a high chance of not realizing when they decided to not vaccinate their children. Once I had my genres chosen with my audience in mind, I began to create the actual images. The process required research online, as my inquiry essay did, but this process was much simpler and quicker. For my political cartoon, I looked at examples of political cartoons for inspiration and noticed similarities in how people were drawn. For my poster I took a few facts from my inquiry essay and attached two images of a baby. This research was much simpler to conduct compared to my inquiry essay because I did not need to find peer reviewed articles or an opposing viewpoint. It was far easier to determine if a political cartoon was effective in its purpose, than if a scholarly article was effective in its purpose. Since I created my genres on my own with my own ideas, there was no issues about citation, but my inquiry essay had multiple pages of citations. During the creation of my two genres, I had to keep my audience and purpose in mind, but also my stance as well. I wanted my message to be clear in order to educate and persuade my audience to vaccinate their children. In addition, I wanted my stance to be heard through my genres. Due to the fact that these genres had very little writing, I had to specific with the few phrases that I included, and symbolic with my images and drawings. This required multiple revisions because I had to be clear and concise in a small amount of space, whereas in my inquiry essay I had pages to explain my thoughts. I used emotional and logical appeal as well as satire to effectively reveal my stance to my audience. Furthermore, I created genres that could be located online through social media, a place that I knew parents visited for information about not vaccinating their children.

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