This portfolio is meant to be a looking glass into the work I have done in English 250 in my first semester, at Iowa State University. It contains whole works such as my summary paper, multiple reflections of ideas discussed in class, and information about me and my communication skills.
The best way to describe my communication style is as unique, I don’t follow conventional methods of editing and revision to produce my best work. I was a part of improv in large group speech in high school in which it is imperative that you produce can produce lots of ideas in as little time as possible. While my ability to improvise communication has its strengths, producing thoroughly revised or professional writing is not one or them.
Strengths of my communication style lie in other areas; in my writing, generating a general outline with big ideas comes easily and quickly. Regarding my oral skills, I can generally hold an audience’s attention very well with interesting dialogue. My visual skills follow a similar trend, as I can quickly capture attention through interesting and relevant imagery. This Portfolio is one of the first assignments to test my electronic skills, but my good sense of color and flow was crucial in the design of this website.
Generally, my writing process is quick in the beginning but slows down dramatically in the later stages as I dive deeper into the subject at hand. My improvisational skills allow me to generate ideas quickly but make it difficult to narrow my focus, as I keep creating new avenues of thinking. I also struggle to take peers’ advice on my work as well because I am very reliant on myself to create ideas, and am often too proud to admit that I might be wrong.
Throughout this course, I have suppressed my improvisational abilities in some ways in order to make a more streamlined writing process. I often find myself spending a lot of time trying to make large changes, both structurally and ideologically, late in the writing process, which I believe stems from a hasty brainstorming stage. To adjust this behavior, I have attempted to slow down the brainstorming process looking more closely at the ideas I create and the information I have available before choosing a path to follow. This saved lots of time on my final project, the documented essay over the electric vehicle market, which was such a large assignment that I was unsure of which path to follow. I spent lots of time and brainpower trying to create a specific topic to delve into. But I believe spending time in the earlier stages aided me later on as I did not have to continually change my central idea. I also allowed my peers to influence me throughout the writing process more in the documented essay than any of my other works, accepting that their ideas are more than helpful when trying to specify a central topic as well as during the revision process.