English 101 Portfolio
Introduction
This is an overview of the major skills that I was expected to master in English 101. In English 101, I was expected to be able to analyze the purpose and context of a text, use critical thinking to participate in our societies most necessary conversations, be able to compose texts through collaboration and our reflections, and be able to understand popular conventions as related to a texts purpose, audience and genre. In order to demonstrate these four skills, I have listed four assignments that I believe that best demonstrate me mastering these skills.
Table of Contents
Goal 1: Rhetorical Awareness. Learn strategies for analyzing texts’ audiences, purposes, and contexts as a means of developing facility in reading and writing
Goal 2: Critical Thinking and Composing. Use reading and writing for purposes of critical thinking, research, problem solving, action, and participation in conversations within and across different communities.
Goal 3:Reflection and Revision. Understand composing processes as flexible and collaborative, drawing upon multiple strategies and informed by reflection
Goal 4:Conventions. Understand conventions as related to purpose, audience, and genre, including such areas as mechanics, usage, citation practices, as well as structure, style, graphics, and design.
Goal 1: Rhetorical Awareness. Learn strategies for analyzing texts’ audiences, purposes, and contexts as a means of developing facility in reading and writing
The first part of our class was dedicated to learning about genres and how they impact the way that we view and expect creative pieces that belong to said genre. To do this, we had to learn how to identify what a genre is, why specific creative pieces belong to certain genres, and how the genre that a piece belongs to affects the purpose of said piece. In order to test our knowledge, we had to write a city guide which is a very loose genre. This was a great test of our knowledge as city guides are a very loose genre with city guides often possessing different unique qualities and traits. Thus, in order to make a city guide, we first had to use our knowledge of genres to determine what a city guide was specifically and what traits a creative work had to possess in order to be considered a city guide. More specifically, we had to identify what kind of purpose, target audience, and context a work had to possess in order to qualify as a city guide. This forced us to analyze different city guides in order to understand what city guides as a genre mean in our society and what qualities we use to categorize certain creative works as city guides. After that, we had to apply our findings and use them to create our own city guide. For my city guide, I decided to make my city guide about my home city of San Diego. Based on my analysis of city guides, I determined that city guides were creative works that helped people navigate, travel to, live, and enjoy themselves within a specific city. Because of this, I chose to make my city guide about San Diego with all of these traits. My city guide contains everything that someone would need to accomplish these things. It contains information on how to navigate around the city, famous sites that people can visit when they come to San Diego, instructions for getting to and from the city, and great events that tourists can attend while in the city.
City Guide for San Diego
Goal 2: Critical Thinking and Composing. Use reading and writing for purposes of critical thinking, research, problem solving, action, and participation in conversations within and across different communities.
The project that best shows this skill is my comic book project. After the city guide project, we began to learn about why people communicate through text. One of the key lessons that we learned was that people do not write unless they believe that they have exigence or an urgent need to write. To put it in simpler terms, people don’t write unless they believe that they have a reason to. Building upon this, we began to see that people rarely communicate for trivial matters and only spend the time and energy to do so unless there is a serious issue at hand that they believe communicating with others about the issue is a prerequisite for solving the problem. We were then tasked with making some kind of comic strip that would bring attention to some kind of issue and how to solve it. To do this, we had to research an issue that we ourselves cared about a lot and then think critically about what we thought was the best solution for solving said issue. The issue that I ended up making and centering my comic strip around was the issue of phishing. Since phishing is a very dry issue, I still had to research the topic as although I was very knowledgeable about the subject, I had to find a way to make the topic interesting to learn about and how to present the solution in a comical manner. After finding some common phishing scams and learning the best ways to prevent phishing, I decided to make my comic about a person who accidently clicked on a phishing scam and ended up getting virus that locked all the data on their computer and then juxtaposing the first person with a 2nd person that properly dealt with the virus. This communicated the dangers of and solutions to phishing in a comical manner.
Goal 3: Reflection and Revision. Understand composing processes as flexible and collaborative, drawing upon multiple strategies and informed by reflection
The work that I believe best showcases this is my Density Research Project. For my density Research project, I had to collaborate with many different people on making a presentation for my chemistry lab. While a slideshow may seem like an odd choice since they are usually concise and to the point with little to no writing, we had to present our findings and proposals in written form so we had few choices to make the presentation concise and visually appealing like normal powerpoint presentations. We thus had to collaborate a lot on making the presentation and we had to work together as a team to create it. To do this, we looked over each other slides and written explanations. If we felt like we didn't meet a particular standard, we would reflect over what we did wrong and do our best to right said wrong.
LinkGoal 4: Conventions. Understand conventions as related to purpose, audience, and genre, including such areas as mechanics, usage, citation practices, as well as structure, style, graphics, and design.
The written piece that I believe best exemplifies this is my Backstroke of the West movie review. Since movie reviews follow a certain format such as giving ratings to different parts of the movie, praising or criticizing the movie for its qualities, and recommending how moviegoers should view it. My review fulfills the purpose, form, structure, style, and design of a traditional movie review. For this reason, I believe that my movie review fulfills goal four.
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