Medium: YorkU Facebook Page Article

Revised Research Report

Fellow students, I must regret to inform you that despite spending years of your lives
slaving away with your studies at York, what you perceive to be around you isnt really what it
seems. What I will imminently be revealing to you will revamp your outlook on everything you
see and read at school going forward. All the advertisements, posters, notices and writing in general that you see at York is considered a part of the YorkU Writingscape. In my writingscape research I tried to break the word down into its fundamental concepts and tried to develop an isolated understanding of the word. I analyzed the concepts of writing and landscapes as those were
the two most easily recognizable derivatives of the word. While looking at these concepts I attributed each concept to a discipline to understand the diversity with which each concept was
perceived across varying fields of study. For example, I found that writing in philosophy was
interpreted to be the ability to articulate and conserve ones ideas and that landscapes in astronomy were often bounds for restricting the scope of a topic.
In my attempt to understand the YorkU writingscape I compared two prominent types of
writing scattered across the university landscape. These were, the York University myTime
advertisements and the course description pages in the York University enrolment module. In
terms of the myTime ads, they are targeted towards you the students, both incoming and current.
You probably encounter them the most when logging on to YorkU.ca. Youre probably wondering by now, what on Earth these ads have in common with the York enrolment module. Having
both pieces of writing readily accessible through the York homepage makes it very easy to jux-

tapose one against the other. The formal nature of the course description pages and the charmed
temperament of the my time ads gave the impression that it would be a perplexing task to find
meaningful correlations between the two. Through my research I was able to find that despite
these two types of writing having largely different objectives, the fact that they originated from
the same institution gave way to a variety of elemental commonalties. A major similarity was
that, much like the my time ad which aimed to inspire current and potential students to pursue
their studies at york, the course description pages often used romanticized writing to entice students to take certain courses. The underlying agenda was the same; profitability. Yorks presence
as both an academic institution and as a business played important roles in the way these pieces
of writing were formulated. Looking back, it begs the question whether you can truly put your
faith in anything you read here.
I want my research to be distributed amongst my fellow York students to help you develop the skills to identify aspects of the York writingscape that you normally wouldnt pay attention to and help you make more informed decisions academically and financially. All the way
from choosing the right university to making sure students conserve money by refraining from
adding and dropping courses partway through semesters, understanding the York writingscape
will empower you to make the best decisions for yourselves and those that depend on you.