BlakePortfolioFinal

Foundations of College Writing Dr. Sherry Portfolio Synthesis Letter Shawna Blake

This semester, in Foundations of College writing, there were five very important objectives I learned and strived for. In this portfolio, I have each of these goals listed along with examples of how I attempted to achieve each one. The examples I provide are mostly from the three projects we completed for class. The first project was similar to a research paper, but was more personal and engaging. For my project I interviewed and observed different club sport athletes to compare their lives to those of the varsity athletes in my online research. For the second project, I transformed the information I collected in my first project into three different genres to suit three different audiences. In my third project, I wrote a personal narrative on events in my past, present, and future that shaped my educational goals into what they are today.

In the second project, where I transformed information from the first project into three different genres, I had to choose an appropriate genre for the audience I was trying to reach. The three different audiences I chose were incoming freshmen, parents of college students, and the general public. Respectively, the three genres I composed were a flyer, a letter, and a satire comic.
 * Goal A. Students will be able to compose for particular audiences and purposes.**

My Ear Project:

I chose to create a flyer for the incoming freshmen audience because they like their information to be simple and succinct. There are tons of flyers all around the campus at Bloomsburg so mine would fit in with the college culture. Most college kids don’t take the time to read long letters or brochures, so a flyer is a quick and easy way to circulate information to college students. Parents are often more interested in topics and need a little more detail when it comes to topics about their children. This is why I chose to write a letter to send home to the parents. Parents are busy as well as college students with work and house responsibilities, so I kept the letter short and to the point while adding enough information to explain the main point. For my last genre, the satire, the audience is the vast general public. The point I was trying to get across with this genre is that stereotypes are not always true. This is an important lesson for people of all ages which is why there was no specific target audience.

In my first project, the research project, I arranged my information into five different titled sections. I researched my topic both online and on my own. I took all of my research and sectioned it off in a way that introduces a problem, then goes through steps to try to solve the problem. The five headings I have for each of the sections are problem, background, method, findings, and conclusion.
 * Goal B. Students will be able to compose using language and conventions appropriate to genre.**

My Clue Project:

I used this format for this specific genre to address the main goal I had. I introduced a problem about my topic in the very beginning which would serve as a theme throughout the entire paper. This theme was comparing and contrasting varsity and club sports and athletes using different types of research. In the background section I gave definitions and foundations for both types of sports. In the method section I explained the research methods I used to reach the conclusions I had. In my findings section I presented all the information I gathered from my own observations and interviews. For the conclusion I brought all the information I collected from online and from my personal experiences together to answer the questions I raised earlier in the paper. This type of formatting made it easier for me to organize my paper and stay focused on my topic in this genre.

To display my skills of this goal, I will again draw examples from my first research project. I had the point of my paper in mind when I started my research. I knew I wanted to convey how varsity and club sports are similar and how they are different. I went online to find articles at the library for information on varsity and club sports as well as varsity athlete behaviors. I then conducted my own research using interviews and observations to gain knowledge about club athlete behaviors. My Clue Project:
 * Goal C. Students will be able to read, select, and use evidence critically to formulate and support arguments.**

The main point I wanted to get across with this project was that even though club sports are not the same as varsity level sports, there are still many similarities between them. To prove this, I found information online about varsity sports and athletes. The information I found included interviews with college varsity team members and background information about the sports. I also researched background information on club sports online to get a little comparison right from the start. For my own research, I observed some varsity games and a club tournament. I also interviewed club sport members and asked them the same questions the varsity members were asked in the survey I found online. I then took all of this information and put it together to support my argument that club sports are a good alternative to varsity sports due to their similarities.

In the second project I mentioned earlier, not only did I compose three of my own genres, but I interpreted other samples as well. I went around campus to find examples of the genre I had in mind and used some of their aesthetic characteristics in the genres I created. We looked at examples of non-print genres in class when we watched satire commercials and discussed what made them satirical. When creating my own genres, I took the C.R.A.P. principles into account which are contrast, repitition, alignment, and proximity. My Ear Project: My Flyer:
 * D. Students will be able to interpret and compose in a variety of media and print/non-print genres.**

In my flyer, the main principles I used were contrast and proximity. I chose all the font colors carefully in order to portray deeper meaning. Most of the font is in gold and maroon since those are the colors of Bloomsburg University and club team members have husky pride just like varsity members. The colors in the Venn Diagram are pink, blue, and then mixed to signify women, men, and co-ed sports respectively. To display the use of proximity, I listed sports in a Venn Diagram to make it easier for a student to find which sport teams they can play on. All the women sports are together under the heading “women”, the men sports are all together under the heading “men” and the co-ed sports are all listed in the middle under the heading “co-ed”. I also took the same information used in my flyer, and composed a letter to parents out of it. I again interpreted three examples and chose characteristics from them that I found useful to put in my own creation. I then created a satire in the form of a word cloud and inserted it into a comic strip to really get my point across. I looked at many other word clouds to get a feel for which characteristics make one useful for satires. It was actually kind of interesting to take the same information and create a variety of genres from it.

After everyone wrote their draft for a project, we would have a day in class for peer reviews. We would get into small groups of three or four students and read through each other's work. We were given a peer review sheet the guide us through the process in class. We wrote down comments while reading to discuss together after everyone was finished. We would then fill out the rest of the sheet ourselves saying what comments were made about our projects and overall what we got out of the peer review as a whole. After we edited our projects we would fill out an individual revision sheet stating which corrections we made from our draft to the final and why we made those corrections.
 * E. Students will be able to discuss and apply appropriate writing processes both individually and in collaborative contexts.**

Peer Review Sheet: Revision Sheet:

In my opinion, the peer review sessions were extremely helpful because it involved collaborating with other peers as well as working individually. The first thing we do when we get the sheet is write what we hope to gain from the review and what might help our peers do what we hope for. We then discuss our projects and give each other feedback collaboratively in order to get different perspectives on each piece of work. At the end of the class we take all the comments given to us by our peers and sum them up in the chart on the front. We then individually expand upon how we will use the comments received in the peer edits to revise our final projects and reflect upon whether or not our expectations for the review were met. Before we hand the peer review sheet in, there is a section where we make comments about our own projects and we have a chance to self reflect on our work. After collaborating with our peers about the writing processes, we would individually fill out the revision sheet with our corrections from our draft to our final copy. We then had to explain why we made this correction which gave us a chance to learn from our mistakes so that we wouldn't make the same error on our next project. I think this was a very important part of the writing process because you got to see the importance of editing and how a couple small changes can really make a difference in the whole project.