ABOUT THIS PORTFOLIO

 

At the start of this Writing 220 class, I felt like a beginner. I’d written essays for class and I’d gone out of my way to take a handful of writing electives and pursue a major that was fairly writing intensive, but I didn’t feel like a writer until I sat down and wrote my “Why I Write” essay for this course.

 

Apparently it’s not absence that makes the heart grow fonder, but being made to sit down and list all the reasons why you enjoy something in the first place.

 

Sorting out my priorities and motivations for why I write and why I like doing it so much gave me more insight into myself than I could have ever hoped for from a class assignment. What I came away with at the end, is that I write because I like impacting others positively-- forcefully changing minds, being inclusive and thoughtful with representation in storytelling, and, maybe most importantly, making people laugh.

 

This created an interesting opportunity for the rest of the things I would write for the semester; in most of my classes, there isn’t a great deal of room for humor in the writing I turn in. Here, though, was a chance to really practice writing comedy, something I’d never purposefully set out to do before outside of social media.

 

Knowing this, then, as we moved into the re-purposing project, I wanted to pick the funniest thing that I’d written in the not-too-distant past that I could think of. This turned out to be a Facebook post about my inability to bake. From there, I plotted out how to expand this idea: new audience to bring this to, new dishes to fail at cooking, and a new writing format and style that I’d never even considered practicing.

 

This assignment was the first time I felt I was really taking the time to cultivate a voice. I’d done pieces that were more conversational before, but none that followed my stream of consciousness so closely.

 

In the same way, the re-mediation that followed acted as an extension of this. The cooking video that I put together was an experiment in improvisation-- it was only scripted in the loosest sense possible and I could not plan out in advance how the cooking was going to go. Where the real rewriting came in was during editing. Clipping silent moments or revising monologues let me recreate the entire experience and make an entirely new story from the existing pieces I had.

 

Editing the video was like no writing experience I’d had before, but once I got past the technical aspect of it, it felt like I was revising any other piece, paring down tedious parts to get to the heart of what I was trying to communicate, just in a new medium. The same principles of revision still applied, the text was just talking back more literally.

 

After those three assignments, I feel confident in calling myself a writer. And I also am completely certain in saying that I need to be writing in the future. And totally positive that I nailed this portfolio.

 

Slam dunk.