Portfolio Reflection

 

This semester, I’ve developed more as a writer than I have in any other semester or year-long class. This is a result from what the different types of thinking, writing, and preparation required from each of the assignments, along with the strategies both suggested in class and ones I’ve adopted on my own that I’ve used in every writing session going forward.

With each assignment, I was forced to take a different approach from the previous assignment. For assignment 1, I needed to relate two cultural artifacts under a shared theme, something I’m not accustomed to doing; I was used to analyzing individual artifacts and their respective themes. Although inspecting each artifact and how they address their individual themes, the theme of my group, (civil unrest), and how they relate to the other artifact led me to view the artifacts in ways I hadn’t before. I found myself to be digging deeper into both artifacts and finding new themes, connections, details, etc. that I would’ve overlooked or never discovered before. This assignment forced me to use deeper analyzation skills, which have since stuck with me in how I interpret and inspect more of the art I consume today. For assignment 2, I had to ponder different aspects of my group’s theme and develop a question that addressed a specific sub-topic of our theme, followed by loads of research to supported/went against that question. I developed useful researching skills in this process that make the process easier and to me, for lack of a better word, more digestible; an example of this is the shortcuts you demonstrated in search engines to find specific articles, like using quotation marks and +’s. For assignment 3, I needed to work closely with my group members to develop something that incorporated all of the research and writing we’ve done individually. This led me to think abstractly to find ways to connect such a wide variety of subtopics addressed in my group. It was also a fun exercise to write my own sort of mini-story and include aspects of it to connect it to the rest of my group’s stories.

While each of the assignments introduced me to new challenges and I did develop new strategies to overcoming these challenged, I’ve yet to mention the most useful strategy I’ve developed in this class that has actually made writing more fun and gratifying: writing over several sessions. In the past, whenever I was presented with a new writing assignment, I’d try to bang it out in one sitting just to get it over with. By writing like this, my writing pieces felt less structured and organized, because I was basically writing based on my streams of thought and not based off any over-arching structuring. However, once I started splitting my work into several sessions, I found improvements in basically all aspects of my writing. Going back and critiquing my past writing after some time has passed opens me up to discover more cohesive and efficient ways to express my thoughts; it’s like getting another perspective on my own work, which is an important aspect I feel I need in my creative process. I need either a second opinion from another person or to step back and go back to my work after a good amount of time to develop a better perspective of the writing I’ve done and what to do with it. Additionally, I found that I enjoy writing much more when I don’t have to finish doing it within a fast-approaching timeframe. Instead of doing it all last minute, I started doing some in one early session, and another in a later session, (normally this second session is last minute for me), and it’s relieved a lot of the stress that I normally associated with writing. All in all, my discovery of splitting writing into several sessions has made the process as a whole more enjoyable and doable.

Out of all the work in this course, I’d have to say I’m most proud of what I did for assignment 1. I realize my final work as a whole has many flaws, structurally and thematically, and might not even make a lot of sense as an essay, but the thinking and conclusions involved with the process of the assignment are what I’m most proud of. At the time, I thought I dug myself into a whole by selecting these 2 very different works, but I insisted on sticking with it them and finding a way to finesse them to work well with one another. This led me to use new processes of analyzing the artifacts, like looking closely at certain aspects of their narratives, which has inspired me to look closer at all the art I take in. Although, while I feel I’m most proud of my process involved in assignment 1, I definitely don’t think assignment 1 is where I peaked as a writer. Of course, I feel like I’ve gotten better throughout all of the assignments, but I feel like my best writing was in assignment 2. I think this is isn’t because I peaked then and I’ve been on the decline since, but because I feel I was way more invested in assignment 2 than I was assignment 3. This is probably due to 2 reasons; one being that the idea surrounding assignment 3 engaged me less than that of assignment 2, and two being the year coming to a close, which is prime time for me to start slacking on my work. This being said, however, I still appreciate the work I did for assignment 3 and I am proud of it to an extent.

My revision process regarding assignments 1 and 2 was comprised of reading each of the tasks I was given and finding where in my essays I made these mistakes. I then tried to correct these mistakes as best I could, while also making my essay feel more cohesive, natural, and organized. After addressing each of the tasks, I reviewed the points I lost in my Quality of Writing and explained why, through my aforementioned revisions, I should regain these points. The labor process regarding the work with my group required more effort and critical thinking from my behalf. This was due to the fact that I sometimes took responsibility for assuring everyone in the group was on the same page. Although, aside from this occasional adopting of a leadership role, I otherwise focused on ensuring my work was acceptable, both for me and my group.

All in all, this class has refined my writing skills and made the act of writing more enjoyable for me. I learned new strategies and techniques that make my work better, and at the same time more enjoyable. I really value this growth as a writer, because writing has been something I’ve had a little interest in and wanted to dabble in for fun, experiment with, and see how much I can develop, and now I feel like I’m ready to take the step into making writing into something I do for fun and not only as a chore for school.