Reflection

To start, I’d like to begin with a quote from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Integrating the American Mind.” “College students are too old to form —we shouldn’t delude ourselves—but they’re not too old to challenge” (348). I certainly felt challenged with creating this portfolio, as well as the coursework throughout this semester, but that’s not to say that it’s a bad thing. It’s quite the opposite in fact. Normally, the word ‘portfolio’ makes me cringe as I’ve made several of them for different classes already on different platforms. I understand the benefits of amassing your work and displaying them in their entirety, but this may be the first time in which I’ve asked to really make use of all the rhetorical decisions available to me, chiefly being my table of contents. I decided to group my projects by concepts I utilized throughout the assignments, such as the constructing credibility or editing in a public space. 

My largest motivator for wanting to display what I’ve done is because of the challenge I received while doing them. Whether or not the final outcome may look easy, I’m fully willing to admit that they weren’t. I’m not sure if it was because I was writing in unfamiliar ways on unfamiliar topics, but I had to shed the cocoon of standard academic writing. Gates says that there is a shift toward multiculturalism in higher education institutes (344). I want to liken the different spheres of our assignments to a sense of multicultural writing. Sci/tech blogs, public arguments, and Wikipedia spaces all function differently, and we were expected as students to be able to write or learn to write in these spaces. They all possess different conventions and different audiences that affect how we construct our content, whether we’re informing or making a claim. I view these spheres as separate cultures, in a way. The customs of Wikipedia include adopting a neutral point of view and avoiding any technical jargon or language, while a sci/tech blog focuses on specific content, but the author needs to establish credibility with his or her audience. There are guidelines and rules specific for each, though there is some basic overlap, like the basics of grammar and syntax.

My main concern with this portfolio is that it’ll read as exactly that, a student-created portfolio for the purpose of fulfilling an assignment, and I realize that it’s ultimately my responsibility to change that. In Christina Haas and Linda Flower’s “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning,” the meaning of a text can be accomplished through a concept “called ‘rhetorical reading,’ an active attempt at constructing a rhetorical context for the text as a way of making sense of it” (167-8). It’s up to me to help create and foster that rhetorical context aside from my portfolio simply being a piece I turn in so as to not fail the class. I want there to a purpose other than for a grade. I don’t doubt whether or not I’ll actually accomplish what I want to with this portfolio, but I do know that a majority of the rhetorical context and velocity is on my shoulders.  

By making a few revisions in my earlier pieces of writing, my primary goal is to clean things up and refine the tone and scope, mainly my Public Argument assignment. I chose to justify some of my sources and add more commentary on the workforce in terms of social media. Regarding the rest of my assignments, I want them to resemble creations of independent thought and theory, rather than writing done for an assignment. Since I am simultaneously in the process of designing a web portfolio from scratch, writing various HTML and CSS, I want to incorporate this as a part of my full digital portfolio, which will showcase several writing and design samples from my undergraduate career.

Works Cited

Gales, Henry Louis, Jr. “Integrating the American Mind.” Eds. William A. Covino and David A. Jollife. Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1995. 342-349.

Haas, Christina and Linda Flowers. “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning.” College Composition and Communication 39.2 (May 1988): 167-183.