Portfolio+Rough+Draft

Kristin Woodlen December 4, 2013 Foundations of Writing Dr. Sherry __**Portfolio**__

In my Foundations of Writing class, I have pushed myself in order to become a better writer. I created different projects that have helped me advance and achieve my goals of becoming a better writer. The projects I created this year include a research paper, a poster, brochure, a satire, and a story talking about my education career. I feel that these projects helped me reach not only my personal goals, but also achieve my course objective goals in the classroom.

At the beginning of the year, my professor, Dr. Sherry, discussed how it was important to know how to write in different ways, using the same information, in order to reach different audiences. During this semester, I wrote a research paper about student-teacher relationships and talked about how students tend to have stronger relationships with their female teachers than with their male teachers. I used the information I had in my paper and wrote it in different forms (e.g. brochure) in order to reach different types of audiences. For example, I created a brochure that had all of my research information and was directed towards school administrators and employers. I chose to create a brochure because I thought I could put a lot of information into it, but still make it creative in order to keep the audience's attention. In order to make sure I reached my specific audience, I made sure that I wrote my brochure with a professional tone. I used past research to coincide with my research and observations. When I was done creating the brochure, I felt like it was professional enough to be given to employers.
 * A. Students will be able to create different works to reach a specific audience. **

**My Brochure: **

During this semester, I created different kinds of works that took my original research paper and created different types of writing pieces. One of the works that I created was a satire. My satire took the research findings that I had in my research paper and connected it to female and male stereotypes in a humorous way in order to show how silly stereotypes are. When I created my satire, I did not want it to be directed toward one specific audience because I felt that it was important for all kinds of different audiences to see the how silly gender stereotypes are. In order to do this, I created another brochure that would mimic my professional brochure slightly. The research that I found from interviewing students was the same in both my professional brochure and in my satire. The difference between the two brochures was the conclusions. In my professional brochure, I concluded that students have stronger relationships with their female teachers based on character traits (e.g. nurturing, friendly, and personable), that are found more in females. In my satire brochure, I concluded that females are better teachers than males because they are naturally good with kids and because in the past a female’s role was only to bear children and to stay home and take care of them. These two brochures were written differently, but were still able to display the same information. The key difference between these two works was how they were written. The professional brochure was written to display my research professionally and satire brochure was written to display my research while incorporating gender stereotypes to make the satire humorous, but make a point that gender stereotypes are bad.
 * B. Students can translate translate their work according to the appropriate genre. **

**My Professional Brochure: My Satire Brochure: **

**C.** **Students will be able to research a topic and be able to formulate a conclusion based on their research.** The first paper I wrote in my Foundations of Writing class was a research paper about student-teacher relationships in the classroom. I spent about a week or two collecting information from past research. During this time I went to the library to learn how I can use the internet to find reliable research sources. While I was at the library, I was able to find three different research journals that I was able to use for my background in my paper. In order to gather more research I also interviewed three students, two males and one female, about their relationships with their students. When I interviewed the students they told me that they all got along better with their female teachers more because of they were more nurturing, personable, and friendly than their male teachers. For the conclusion of my research paper I used my background information and my findings to come up with an informed opinion. After reading previous research and investigating on my own, it was really easy for me to come up with a conclusion because I was able to put all of the pieces together. In my paper I concluded that students get along with their female teachers better because they look for qualities and personality traits that are primarily found in women. During the time I spent working on my research paper I was able to improve my research skills and my analyzing skills and my writing skills.

**My Research Paper: **

In order to create our own different works to display our research from our research paper we looked and discussed, in class, the different ways we could show off our research and findings. For one or more weeks we gathered different print genre types that displayed information well. One of the tools that we had to determine if the work was well done or not was the C.R.A.P. principles.
 * D. Students will be able to understand and create different types of writing pieces. **

**Contrast** – Use creativity in order to make the most important information stick out and easy to point out. **Repetition** – Repeating the most important information throughout the entire work. **Alignment** – Use the alignment property in order to keep the displayed information neat. **Proximity** – Grouping similar information into groups in order to keep information organized.

These principles are utilized in creating different genres because they help create the best work that engages the audiences. The class’ second big project was called the EAR project, which stood for Engaging other Audiences with your Research. The main goal of this project was to better ourselves in creating different works that would be able to engage different audiences. For the project I created three different types of works, a brochure, a poster, and a satire, that reached different audiences, but was based on the same research. Before I started to create my different works, I looked at good examples of the works I wanted to make that I found around the school. For example, I collected three different types of posters that helped influence the turnout of the poster I made. I took the C.R.A.P. principles and analyzed each poster to figure out their strengths and weaknesses. Then I took all of the strengths that I found and tried to incorporate the techniques for my poster. Overall, the biggest tool that I used for this section was the C.R.A.P. principles. I think that they will come in handy with future projects throughout my educational career.

**My Poster Examples: My Poster:**

Before turning in a final draft of our work we were able to group up with our colleagues and discuss our papers in order to gain perspective and figure out what works in our paper and what doesn’t. I participated in the peer reviews because I wanted to know that my projects were on the right track, meaning that they were focused on a specific topic and were engaging the correct audience. My first peer review session for my first project, the research paper, was the most beneficial for me because research papers were never really my strong suit and I wanted to make sure I was doing things right.
 * E. Students will be able to be able to discuss and apply different writing techniques both in groups and on their own. **

During the group session we all read our papers aloud in order to catch mistakes we wouldn’t normally spot when reading the paper. After we read the papers aloud we discussed each paper thoroughly in order to understand what was really good in our paper and what we need to fix. For example, my colleagues in my group said that my research paper was really good because it was easy to follow and organized well, however, they suggested that I make the problem I was researching easier to find within my paper. I took this into consideration and made sure the problem my research paper revolved around was easier to find within in the paper for my final draft. Whenever we peer edited our rough draft papers, I always utilized my time because I strive to be a better writer and always love advice on how to make my paper better. I also feel like it's important for me to help others by reading their papers because then they can improve as well. I also like reading other people's papers because I know everyone has a different writing style and I think it's good to learn different writing styles.

I really liked using these peer reviews as a tool because I liked gaining learning how people react to what I write that way I can improve on it. In my major, digital forensics, I have to take a programming class. When we make programs one of the stages our programs has to go through is called the Debugging stage. In the Debugging stage the program runs through the code to check for errors and other issues. If the program finds issues, they are highlighted so the programmer can find it easily and fix the problem. For me, I like to think that the peer review is like the debugging stage for our projects.

**Research** **Paper Rough Draft: ** **Research Paper After Peer Revisions:**