Portfolio Essay Ashleigh McCoy Ingram English 1102 22 April 2014

Portfolio Essay: From Point A to Point B

There is only one direction you can go as a writer and that is forward. As writers, we are always growing and learning more about ourselves and our preferences. In the past two semesters at University of North Carolina-Charlotte I have gained more knowledge and skill than I ever thought I would. In my e-Portfolio on Weebly I included all my final drafts, blog posts, three process artifacts, two feedback artifacts, two Reader Response Letters, and 2 wildcard artifacts. Throughout the course this semester we have gone over three rhetorical analysis tools that I can use to analyze my e-Portfolio. The first tool is the Rhetorical Triad, which is made three components including author, audience, and purpose. The author of this portfolio is not just me as I am; it is me as a student in a writing course. The audience of my ePortfolio is Professor Ingram and whoever else is interested in the teachings of English 1102. The purpose of my e-Portfolio is to demonstrate all that I learned and the assignments that aided my in the process. The second tool that we went over in class is the Multi-modal tool; this includes modes such as spatial, linguistic, aural, gestural, and visual modes. On my homepage I applied the spatial mode by spacing everything out evenly and making the page easy to navigate with the readers eyes. The individual pages for each category of assignment also have similar spacing and the actual pages of the assignments are separated by titles. Linguistically, I

used a minimal amount of words to describe myself as a writer because I dont want this to be the focus of the website. The best way to show who I am as a writer is to provide my work to review. I also included a quote by Arthur Polotnik about my outlook on writing and revising. Visually, the colors are peaceful (to me at least) and the Mickey Mouse picture brings back feelings of happiness relating to childhood memories. The last of the three tools I learned in this class are Aristotles Appeals (pathos, ethos, and logos) and Karios. In the aspect of Pathos, which is how the author appeals to the readers emotions, the biggest way I tried to emotionally appeal to the reader was the Mickey Mouse picture. This picture makes me think of my childhood and in turn the ignorant, blissful kindness that children have. I thought this would be a good feeling for the reader to have when reading about my experiences with kindness in my first final draft, the Exploratory Essay. In regards to the purpose of this essay, I plan to analyze the key concepts that I learned and helped me through the particular assignment.

Final Drafts
The first final draft I have included is my Exploratory Essay. This essay was the first real writing assignment is this course. The prompt was simply What are you passionate about? What can you not ignore? I have never had experience with such a loose guidelines so this paper was a real learning experience with deciding for me what style or format to choose. I ended up writing about my passion for kindness and how I found fulfillment and satisfaction from my experience at a women and childrens center in my hometown. I had never really written about this experience so that in itself was a self-learning process about how I wouldve described that chapter in my life. Also, writing about something that youre passionate about

really opens the possibility that you arent necessarily passionate about things you simply enjoy on a day-to-day basis. In my essay I state this when I say: I found myself making lists for reassurance that I was picking the right topic; however, all the items that I listed I had to terminate because I could think of one thing that I didnt like about them. The process of picking my passion was not what I was expecting. Brainstorming was not what I pictured but it helped me narrow down something that I can without a doubt say that Im passionate about. The second final draft that I included is my midterm assignment. This was by far the most insightful assignment in regards to how I was doing so far in the class and how I can apply what weve learned so far to an e-Portfolio. The first part of the assignment asked me to look over the evaluation part of the syllabus and give myself a grade based on what Ive done so far in the course. Of course I gave myself an A, but the fact that the prompt asked me to look back over the evaluation helped me understand what was expected of me to get an A (which was my goal for the course anyways). I thought this was a really clever way for us as students to look at our work from a professors perspective so we could improve from what weve been doing thus far. The second piece of the midterm asked me to analyze a sample portfolio and give it a grade. I liked that we had to do this because it was helpful to see a completed portfolio and grade it seeing as we had not worked on our own much at that time. The prompt for this section says to consider the modes of communication; this was the first time I was asked to rhetorically analyze anything, so it was a learning experience. I said things like: The linguistic mode is expressed through the use of the bullet points used on the homepage to describe her. She decided to use short, informative statements to describe herself. These modes are very vital to the grade we receive on my e-Portfolio and I realized that through this midterm writing

assignment. The third part of this assignment was to explain our inquiry question we had formulated about the topics from our exploratory essays. My inquiry question had gone from What is kindness? to What is the human capacity for evil?- I basically 180ed with my thinking. I hadnt really brainstormed my question until this assignment asked me to, which was helpful because I really did need to get that ball rolling. Next, the third final draft is my Annotated Bibliography. This was one of my favorite writing assignments solely because I had never done an Annotated Bibliography before. Researching kindness was my first step because this assignment immediately followed my Exploratory Essay. In the annotations I had to establish some type of credibility for the Author I was citing, moreover practicing the appeal of Ethos. For example, my first annotation begins with, Arthur C Brooks gains his credibility through his masters at Florida Atlantic University and his doctorate at Pardee RAND. As I continued to research, I began to think of specific kind acts to pursue. Charity was my first thought so I look into the motives behind people doing charity. Religion was a strong lead and after researching further my inquiry question became Can nonaffiliated individuals gain fulfillment and satisfaction from doing charity work? ; the bibliography assignment aided tremendously in the formation of my inquiry question. Finally, my fourth and last final draft was my multi-genre project. This project consisted of two genres relating to my inquiry question (a newsletter and a flyer for a faux-charity) and a reflection of these pieces. When choosing a genre I had to consider my round table audience. This audience consisted of people who would be interested or engaged in charity or those who are non-affiliated religiously who wish to be involved in charity work. The part of the Rhetorical Triad that had the writer define audience didnt seem too important to me until we had to

configure our round tables. All my previous papers or research projects in life have always been geared towards my teachers; it was a no brainer. Now that the project was being read by someone that was not sitting at your round table was interesting. The whole concept of not writing a final research paper, but doing two different drafts relating to my topic were very foreign to me also. Pathos was expressed greatly all through my two genres using the pictures and stories from my best friend Jordans experience with children in Haiti. I had not applied Karios to any of my pieces up to this point, but in the reflection I state: Beginning in the 1990s, the percentage of young Americans who are non-religious have skyrocketed (Harris); this makes this message relevant at this particular time to my young audience. I mention this because now because Karios is the timeliness of a piece, or why its relevant at this particular point in life. The multi-genre project was the final assignment in our Extended Inquiry Project (beginning with the Exploratory Essay) and it showcases the growth well in my e-Portfolio with how I have the final drafts in order.

Process Works
The process works I have provided in my e-Portfolio are my blog posts, three process artifacts, two feedback artifacts, two Reader Response Letters, and two wildcard artifacts. My blog posts are my personal logging of thoughts throughout this semester. For almost every major topic we covered in class there was a blog post assignment that followed. Before any other assignment was given the class started out with blog posts. These posts were very helpful with jotting down thoughts about the classs discussion topics. My favorite blog post that I fully understood and enjoyed was the second one from 2/06/2014. This blog post was

about the three rhetorical analysis tools we discussed in class that week; the post is almost right after they were introduced to the class. In this post I suggest that the linguistic mode overlaps with the audience aspect of the rhetorical triad. The importance of word choice and how it should be specific to your audience was very apparent to me when I was considering what the write about in this post. The importance of audience was something that seemed to become more apparent throughout the course of the assignments that followed Blog Post #2. Another blog post that I can look back on and see that I had things to learn was the first blog post. I state: The second conclusion I came to, which is obvious to me as I write this blog post, and to the readers who read this post, is that this course requires the use of many online elements. I never really expected a writing course to have so many online elements and I was surely not prepared for it at the time I was writing this post. I learned so much about how to make an online portfolio and what it means to apply the multi-modal aspects to it to make it successful. The blog posts required me to revisit my Weebly site regularly which increased my much needed familiarity with the site. Second, my three process artifacts are placed throughout my e-Portfolio in their appropriate sections. For example, my first is my first draft of my exploratory essay with feedback on it. This draft is located on my page titled Exploratory Essay which is where the final draft is also. This draft displays the micro-revisions I like to get out of the way after the beginning drafts. I usually dont change my flow of ideas or major topics around after my first draft and I wanted to show that by including this draft. My second example of my process of writing is my Extended Inquiry brainstorm sheet. This sheet is photographed and placed on the page titled Multi-Genre Project. I put this here because the whole Multi-Genre project is

based off of your Inquiry question. Also on this sheet I brainstormed the type of questions I would ask Jordan because I featured her story in my newsletter about a non-religious person finding fulfillment by participating in a religious charity program. I usually dont write my thought process down but the inquiry question almost required it so I could visualize the evolution of the question. The third process artifact in my portfolio is a comment I got on a blog post by my classmate Sam. I decided to include one thing from my classmates that helped me in some way grow. In her comment she says that she found group work very helpful because she received feedback from many viewpoints, not just one. This class was the first time I had been required to do group work and revision workshops. I always appreciated the opinion of others who are higher educated than myself, so this concept was a hard one to grasp. I almost didnt trust the options of my peers only because I my ego got in the way; I suppose I thought I knew best. My opinion quickly changed, beginning with this post. I did not know much about Sam but I did look through her blog posts after this comment and realized she was brilliant; I felt a lot better about trusting my paper in my peers hands. Furthermore, the third categories of my process works are my feedback artifacts. These, like my process artifacts, are placed in their appropriate pages. The first feedback artifact is located at the bottom of the page titled Multi-Genre Project. It is the feedback I received from the first draft of the two genres and their reflection. I incorporated this into my e-Portfolio because it is a great example of what kind of feedback I received throughout this whole class. Though I did not make any major changed to my project after receiving this feedback, I believe it is successfully shows what kind of feedback I received throughout the whole class. Suggestions are a large part of helping someone revise their paper and I learned this through

this feedback. On this feedback sheet, Ms Ingram says: I cant help but wonder if a digital genre might better reach your target audience? It is suggestions like these that have given me good examples on how to give feedback to others in this course. The second feedback artifact I included was Ms. Ingrams Reader Response Letter in response to ours. This letter is in the page titled Reader Response Letters and at the bottom of the page. This feedback was extremely helpful in regards to squashing any misconceptions we had about the concept of arguing our topics. In the letter she quotes things we have said such as You Said: I have to present both sides of the argument. I say: The goal in most academic research writing is not to present a fair cause so that your readers can decide: your goal is to prove your point. This quote alone is very eye opening and changed my opinion on research forever. I had never really considered that just because I research the opposing side of my argument does not mean I have to include it in my essay; it only means Im better equipped with knowledge on the subject as a whole. Next, my fourth components of my process works are my two favorite Reader Response Letters (RRLs). The first RRL is the third one that was assigned and it was about a section in the textbook about how a writer should talk to their audiences. The reading introduced the fact that a writer can have multiple outfits or styles of writing. You can put on an outfit then take it off again, which demonstrates the flexibility of the situations a writer could be put it. Considering this idea, a writer cannot forget to take off this outfit; by this I mean I believe a writer should stay true to who they are and their ideals while altering their style of writing. I reiterate this in my RRL by stating: What you wear does not necessarily change who you are, but it circumstantially expresses a certain side of you (or viewpoint you have). My second RRL is the last one we as a class wrote. This was the RRL that Ingram wrote the response letter to

which defines what making a good argument means and establishing Ethos. In the ethos regard, the selected reading for the RRL was basically saying a writer needs to become knowledgeable on both sides of the argument to effectively argue one side. This reading, along with the previously noted RRL from Ms Ingram, made this idea really start to resonate with me. My fifth and final component in my process works were the two wildcard artifacts. I chose the Multi-modal worksheet and Aristotles Appeals and Karios power point because both of these tools were posted to the moodle site for this class and they were often referenced back to many times throughout all of my assignments for reminders and extra information. In each of my assignments during this course I have had to consider what modes of communication I used and what appeals I expressed to my readers. Towards the beginning of the semester I found myself going back to these two artifacts a lot mainly because I could not remember all of that information off the top of my head. I found it extremely helpful that they were posted online for referencing.

Key Concepts
In this course there are two key concepts I have learned that have really resonated with me. The first key concept I can definitely say helped guide me through this course is risk-taking. The Exploratory Essay is a great example of taking a risk, seeing as there were almost no requirements and the loose boundaries were something I wasnt used to. In addition to the Exploratory Essay, the Annotated Bibliography was another thing that I worked on that I wasnt used to. I had never done a bibliography like that before but as I had done with the Exploratory

Essay, I went for it. Risk-taking as a whole is just a huge part of writing in general and I believe if you are not taking risks you are not writing anything worth reading. The second key concept is how to make connections. Before this class I did not ever start with one topic to write about and end with another related topic. During the process of creating my inquiry question I was amazed by the different connections one could make with using just one word like kindness. It was quite interesting to track the thought processes and the possibilities seemed endless, which made finding a relevant possibility a feat. Making relevant connections was my main concern and something that I will carry with me in life, not just in English classes.

Conclusion
To conclude, in this course I believe I deserve a C. I only say C in the course because I missed the amount of days that exceeds the limit, therefore earning myself a grade two letters below what I normally would receive on the assignments. That being said, what I really think I deserve based on the work that I did is an A. I believe I have worked hard on everything that I was assigned and understood fully what was expected of me. My portfolio is arranged in a way that is easily navigable for the reader and in this essay I have explained every piece included. This course overall has been such a learning experience filled with many concepts and tools that I will carry with me to my next writing journey.