Portfolio Introduction Essay

            In this introduction of my portfolio I will demonstrate and analyze my learning in Writing 39B. I will pull assignments from the portfolio and show what I learned from each piece of work regarding the course objectives. I will organize my essay from most important assignments to smaller, minor assignments and describe which course objectives I feel that I conquered in each piece and why. To do this I will use Noël Carroll's "The Nature of Horror" to talk about themes in the class and how they effected my work and learning process.

            The RIP Project was not only my favorite assignment to work on, but I feel that I learned the most from it. In the RIP Project my group and I created a video for our peers using the horror genre. Being the creators of a media instead of just the audience made me realize that the concept of rhetoric and the rhetorical situation is everywhere. The RIP video we created would have been different had our audience been made up of a different subculture of the population. Because we knew that our video was being presented to people of our age, and people who also attend UCI it was easy for us to create a text that we knew everyone would enjoy. For example the scene where Maria is talking to Viviana about a test, may have been different if we were presenting to an audience who wasn't predominantly college students. Our video may not even have been filmed in a college apartment if we were making our video for an audience that doesn't relate to that.  Our RIP video Guilt Trip grew out of our own rhetorical situation and working on the RIP Project opened my eyes to just how important an author of creator's situation and history is.

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            Genre had a huge effect on our video, it is one of the most important factors in our creative process. We used Noël Carroll's definition of the art horror monster "an extraordinary creature in our ordinary world" to create our impure monster. The music, the script, the plot, the acting, the characters, everything relied on the horror genre. I feel like my group used all the tricks in the book to create a video that was suspenseful, symbolic, and entertaining.

             Creating the horror video made me begin to think about places differently, I was constantly looking for spooky places that would help our scenes. In the scene where I crawl out from under Maria's bed, that was not a planned scene from the beginning. At some point during filming Viviana and Maria went outside of the room and I looked under the bed and I thought to myself "I could fit under there." I crawled under and waited for my group to come back to where I could scare them, and I was already dressed as the monster. When they walked in I popped out and they both squealed and cussed. It was great. Then Viviana said that we should add it in the video, and that is how the scene was born. Also we wanted to shock the audience with the final reveal that Maria was her own monster. We thought it would be a nice take on the horror theme because the worst monsters are the monsters you face within yourself, we wanted that to be clear in our film, horror is all about facing your inner demons and becoming better at defeating them.

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            Creating the RIP was a very useful experience, I feel like the skills I improved during the scripting, filming and editing processes will help me in the future with anything I do that I need to use communication for. Writing the script and making storyboards with my group was something I'll never forget because we had so many different ideas that didn't seem to overlap anywhere at first, but when everything fell together and we had our final scene ideas mapped out, we all felt very accomplished and proud of ourselves, even though there was still much to be done. Being able to collaborate with my group was such a great experience because I was working with two other people who had completely different ideas from each other and from me. I feel like this has helped my collaboration skills because I practiced openness and flexibility. Because we are three different people with different backgrounds and the same goal, there are many ways to achieve the same goal, but with my group, disagreement was not equivalent to frustration and hostility.

             Disagreement to us, meant improvement for the project, only the great ideas survived, therefore our creativity was able to flourish. For example, in the beginning our idea for our video was a girl who was afraid of change, however because we talked it over and wanted to improve the motives of our main character, our idea evolved into a girl who wanted to change, and needed to change. We were all very engaged in the project, we spent about four nights just filming until late at night at Maria's apartment, and making the scene the best it could be. If the scene wasn't perfect, and we weren't happy with it we would re-shoot until we were satisfied.

             Throughout the course of Writing 39B I feel I have grown as a writer more than I had expected to. I came into the course just expecting a regular English class like I have had in the past where we read something, talk about it a bit, and move on, usually I didn't feel like I had gained anything from doing the activity, but this class was so much more. At the beginning of the course I did not truly know what rhetoric was and did not really understand the importance of looking for deeper meanings in text. However taking this class has opened my mind and expanded my view in the literature world. I feel like I am so much better at writing now than I was in the beginning of the quarter. Now I know how to look for meanings in text and communicate my own feelings without using the "five paragraph essay" method that I feel was beaten into my brain. The activities we have done in Writing 39B have made me feel like I am re-learning the English language because I have missed so much meaning in the past by just assuming that the author will always say what they mean, but now I feel more confident about reading, understanding and writing.

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            I have always been a very straight forward person and never have looked for deeper meanings within the text; however now that I know how to look for meaning I just can't stop. I think this was very prevalent in my RA Paper because I became so excited that finally I was able to see what the author intended to say that I wanted to analyze every single word as the class had done with the two sentence horror stories. I did this by annotating the entire story and then after figuring out what I wanted my thesis to be I picked out the most important things from my annotations.  With the RA Paper I learned how to read the text closely and understand them within their rhetorical situation.

            The RA Paper was the first formal analysis paper that I have ever been proud of, during the process of writing the RA Paper I realized how important drafting is. I came to Professor McClure not really having a true direction with my draft and after he read through and told me what to take out I understood that I needed the meat of the argument up front and all of the fluff wasn't even important enough to make it to the final draft. Drafting for me is important because no matter what I am writing whenever I go back and read what I wrote I always find little mistakes and things that could be improved. Practicing drafting with the RA was a good way to improve my paper and thought process. Now that I have had the practice of formal analysis with the RA Paper, any paper that I write becomes easier and easier because of the techniques we learned in class that were intended to help us with the Rhetorical Analysis paper. I am not afraid of writing anymore, writing is no longer my personal horror because of the practice we were given in this course. 

            Some of the smaller assignments such as the Zombie Power point about genre and the two sentence horror stories helped me understand our goals in the class. I feel like doing small group presentations in front of the class helped me improve my skills with live presentations and visual accompaniment, I am happy we practiced this in class because in the future if I ever need to present an idea in a business or scholarly setting I know I can refer back to my fond memories of Writing 39B to help me through and I can reflect on what has gone well and what I need to improve. The two sentence horror stories were a tremendous help when writing the RA. When we practiced analyzing the text in class the skills we learned transformed the way I read, think, and write. Overall I understand that all of our assignments had a purpose and I am thankful that I learned so much from each thing I read in class and each assignment we did, all of the course objectives were met.