In my portfolio for English 1102 there are many pieces that I have written throughout the course of the

semester that demonstrate my understanding of the five elements, which include inquiry, revision, collaboration, intertextuality, and rhetorical awareness. Inquiry is the process of asking questions that you dont know the answers to and doing research to find out the answers. My first introduction to inquiry in this class came from the inquiry group project that I worked on with Mason, Garren, and Austin. We were grouped together due to our shared interest in finding out more about the History/Culture of monsters. We came up with questions that we didnt know the answer to and then found sources that would help us to answer the questions. The next inquiry project I did was a solo project that consisted of three different genres (academic, creative, and social.) For the extended inquiry project I decided to discuss standardized tests and why they seem to play such an important role in determining a students intelligence. My final paper for the extended inquiry project used citations from sources that I had found while in the beginning stages of formulating my proposal and writing out my first outline during class. My portfolio shows revision, specifically with the multimodal monster project and the academic genre of the extended inquiry project. I have two drafts for the aforementioned projects, the first draft and the final draft. The first drafts for both pieces were not necessarily bad, but I know for a fact I did not put forth my best effort when doing them for the first time. However, I do believe that the second drafts were much better, because I put more time and effort into them. Revisions are useful to do because they allowed me to reflect back on what I wrote and the advice I received from Janis, Joseph, Logan, and Zachary about my portfolio helped me to go back and make necessary changes, such as being more reflective as to why I uploaded certain documents, as well as letting me know about specific problems within my portfolio such as the button on my homepage not working. I do find the whole process of revision to be a bit tedious, especially when you have to look for errors in someone elses work, but it is useful when to get to see errors that you didnt know you had made or any disconnect in your work that you did not previously see. We did plenty of collaborations in this class, that are evidenced by the various writing workshops on Moodle, the third columns of our dialogic journals, and even the class discussion that we had to lead in our inquiry group. During the first week of class I got a chance to interview Logan and Mirna, which was pretty fun because we got to work together to interview each other and then write a short interview based off the information we received. I found the writing workshops to be extremely useful because we could get feedback from our peers before we had to submit assignments for a grade. The responses in the third column that we received from our classmates were nice because we got to see other peoples opinions and perspectives to a certain topic that

we had read about before class. Group discussions and the class discussion that we had to lead were as a group were fun learning experiences because we got a chance to talk with our peers and get their point of view on topics that were relevant to what we were studying at the time. Intertextuality is defined as the relationships between texts, especially literary ones. Its about making connections between pieces and I believe intertextuality is best shown through my multimodal monster essay and my inquiry group, which culminated into me developing a new inquiry which became my extended inquiry project on standardized tests. After completing the above three assignments, I believe the connection between those assignments is the inquiry group project, which talks about the culture/history of monsters. Delving deeper into that, the multimodal monster essay and the extended inquiry group project play off of how monsters are cultural. Monopolies are a cultural entity and so is the idea of a childs future being tied to how well they do on a high stakes test. Rhetorical awareness is part of the notion of understanding the audience to whom you are writing in order to make your pieces more understandable to each audience. The extended inquiry project is made up of three different components that all have a different genre. The academic paper is geared more towards teachers, since they would be more likely to read them, while the social genre is aimed at college students who have already went through high school and the multiple standardized tests they had to complete in order to graduate, and the creative piece would be for high school students. The importance of rhetorical awareness is knowing exactly who you are writing for, which is oftentimes difficult. For instance, I had problems with finding an audience for the multimodal piece, even after making revisions to it.