ePortfolio

            I have learned so much throughout the course of this semester. Looking back at my skills as a writer and comparing them to the skills I have learned is astonishing to me. By working on projects throughout the course I have achieved critical thinking, reading, and composing skills, rhetorical knowledge, and skills using processes.
           Through working on the summary analysis project I was able to gain knowledge in critical thinking, reading, and composing. At first I really struggled with this project because I had a hard time analyzing the article I chose. It’s not that the article was difficult to understand, it was just that I had never done that before. Of course as humans we are analyzing things constantly in our everyday lives, but I really struggled with adding that into my paper. I personally had to break this assignment down into multiple steps. First I wrote the summary aspect of the assignment. Next I picked out quotes from the article that really stood out and had an impact on me. Then I made “quote sandwiches” for each quote I had chosen. In the quote sandwich you set up the quote by introducing who said it and the context, then include the quote, and lastly you analyze it. This technique of breaking everything down to make the project simpler was a really good strategy for me. I think what I struggled with the most was explaining what the author was appealing to. When I created my quote sandwiches this became much easier for me. Overall, I believe that my critical thinking, reading, and composing skills improved a lot by working on my summary analysis paper. I had to learn how to read an article, analyze if the author did well on persuading the audience of his/her topic by using different appeals, and put that into my own words in the essay. I was very happy with my final draft of this paper and was very proud of myself for working through the struggles I faced.
            Both the documentary project and the summary analysis helped me gain knowledge with rhetoric. After struggling through and completing these projects I was able to analyze context and create texts. The documentary project was a nice introduction to rhetoric for me. Even though we did not have to add a lot of analysis in this project, I still was able to analyze it myself. Most of the project was summarizing a documentary film that you watched and explaining how the different components and use of film techniques helped to grab at the audience. This helped me when it came time for the summary analysis project that I mentioned earlier. I achieved skills in analyzing and determining the purpose and effectiveness of the way the documentary film and article changed in either tone, design, form, structure, and/or voice.
           I always thought I had a decent organization process/pre-writing method I used before I started a paper, but I realized my previous method wasn’t very effective. I learned how to be successful in using processes for my projects. The microtheme assignment really helped me become more comfortable and open to using this type of process to gather my ideas before just jumping into the final paper. The microtheme was a great tool to open up questions, create thoughts, and explore the topic at hand. Even though the microtheme is designed to dig deeper and explore the topic, it also really helped me focus on the purpose. This might have been the shortest assignment but it was definitely the hardest assignment for me by far. The reason this assignment was so difficult for me is because I have been trained my whole life to argue your side in a pro/con type of way. Also, I was never able to put my input into papers I had to write in the past. For these reasons the microtheme was extremely difficult for me. In the end I was able to create a microtheme that I was proud of. It may have taken multiple rough drafts and rounds of editing, but that’s what practicing is all about!