Blog-Portfolio: Analytic Reflection

     Reflecting on my Advanced Writing and Editing course, I recall discovering at the onset that I was tasked with composing a blog throughout the semester and initially feeling fearful. I had never blogged before--beyond a few uninspiring posts in a hidden Blogger account at the tail end of high school. However, the more I considered the situation, the more comfortable I felt with the idea.

     Becoming a participant in public discourse--a writer composing arguments and unpacking the arguments of others--quickly became a major goal of mine. I found myself analyzing theory and other texts for useful information to my progression as a writer and editor, gleaning what I could in order to improve with each passing assignment.

     In the end, I felt this blog acted as a precise measurement of my growth. Primarily, it exemplified my better understanding of the role of citizen critics and their occasional missteps, as well as the importance of kairos within texts. These better grasps weren't due primarily to reading the required texts, but instead to application of the theories to my own writing. I evolved from an often satirical slant to a more professional, academic voice.

Major Projects:

• Paint it White 

Repurpose a high-stakes technical argument for a more public audience in the spirit of sci-tech blogs.

• Wikipedia: Multimodality (awaiting approval)
• Editing Out Dissonance: Wikipedia and Reconciliation Pedagogy

The whole class--in smaller working groups--composes, revises, edits, and submits a well-researched article to Wikipedia that contributes to a “topic” identified.

Supporting Projects:

• Multi-layered, Esoteric Textual Analysis (META)

Put two course readings into conversation with one another; synthesize the topics into a single critical text.

• Back to the Future of Reading

Discuss the “rhetorical situation” of your chosen text and describe how it functions as an “intertext.”

• Riddled with Irony

Locate, from any source, a text that loosely falls in the scientific and technical sphere--that makes a good case study for possible misrepresentation, illegitimacy, or misuse. Then, write a critical and nuanced explanation of why that is, discussing how the misuse or misrepresentation occurred and consider the audience(s) or context(s) for it.

• Why Ann Coulter Behaves the Way She Does
• A World of Her Own 

Select a text that crosses a line from clarity to obscurity, from transparency to opacity, from complex to reductive, and from 
order to shapelessness. Do whatever it takes to reclaim a sense of clarity, transparency, complexity, and order.

• "Where Rhetoric Meets the Road"

Put two course readings into conversation with one another; synthesize the topics into a single critical text.

• Diving into Wikipedia

Locate two articles in Wikipedia listed as needing improvement (and that are open to editing): 1) an article that has been put on its "watchlist" as well as 2) an article in the "community portal" page listed under "help out." Make as few or as many improvements as necessary.

     With this blog now behind me, I have already begun brainstorming ideas for a new blog theme to begin post-graduation that I feel can be quite powerful. My writing has no doubt changed for the better, now not always relying on an ironic or sarcastic tone to keep the audience's interest. That said, I still look forward to the next opportunity to bring back my sarcasm.