By Alex Bozo-Santana, ENC1101 Summer 2021
The purpose of this portfolio is to showcase the different pieces of writing from ENC1101, hopefully demonstrating how we were able to meet the learning objectives of this class. Among these objectives was understanding fundamental concepts like rhetoric, purpose, genre, audience, and metacognition, later on applying them in our writing.
I found these concepts to be extremely helpful when working on the Multimodal Remediation. This assignment asked us to remediate a claim about writing we had previously written. In my remediation, I decided to construct a children’s book that resembled the meaning of the claim, which deals with turning an idea into reality, which requires effort and labor. Three things were needed to construct this book: storyline, script, and design of each page. Inventing a storyline and constructing a script that fitted the level of comprehension of a child required a lot of thought and reflection. I had to think of a way to make something complex be sufficiently understandable for a kindergarten kid, which was not easy. Without knowledge of rhetorical choices, and the importance of “audience” or “purpose“, I would have failed to explain my claim in a way a child could comprehend it, consequently failing to serve the purpose of the assignment.
Another learning objective was to produce writing that responded and adapted effectively to specific rhetorical situations. One of the rhetorical situations we encountered was to “develop four short, concise claims that address writing myths, assumptions, or common misunderstandings that students have about writing, rhetoric, language, or learning.” My claim, Supporting Claims With Meaningful Reasons, talks about how in college writing we must support our claims with strong reasons and evidence to help our audience better understand and consider our point. In order to successfully complete this assignment, we had to rely on two different sources to grant credibility to our claims. I found this particular claim to be of great importance, since without reasons to support our claims, we are not giving our audience enough information to consider our point.
Progressively, by constantly engaging on writing assignments, our writing process and strategies became stronger. For this portfolio I provided insight on my process, found in the Picture of the Writer section that includes handwritten notes that demonstrate how I wanted the “introduction” and “conclusion” of the project to look. In them you can see how I first lay down the information I want to include in the introduction, and then I organize it in a way that makes sense to me and to the audience, providing a glimpse of my invention, composition, and revision processes. In this page you will also find a screenshot of both the introduction and conclusion from the draft that was submitted; this way you can compare the beginning and final product.