Welcome to Devin Chang's Writing 39B ePortfolio for Winter quarter of 2022! This quarter's theme was the Western and Neo-Western genres.

Reflective Introduction

This ePortfolio encompasses and encapsulates the majority of the work I have done throughout my time and experience in Writing 39B. Throughout each week we were presented with a variety of Critical Reading Reflective Exercises to showcase and test our abilities, as well as various RIP Exercises, ultimately preparing us for a Rhetoric-In-Progress Project (RIP Project), one of the two major assignments in this course.

This quarter definitely had a rocky start, with several weeks of online learning where none of us knew when (or if) we would go back to in-person. These few weeks I felt rather lost and found it quite difficult to push myself to participate in Zoom group activities, but I nevertheless was able to involve myself in group discussions several times over Zoom. After we went back to in-person, I found it much easier not only to interact and converse with my classmates but also to get constructive feedback from my professor. My engagement was not very high for the first few weeks of online school, as I just generally felt confused and was also dealing with personal issues at the time. However, I think my engagement had improved greatly by the end of the course, and I am very proud of the improvements I have made in my writing ability over this course.

Several iterations of peer-reviewing allowed me to see new fresh perspectives on my personal writing strengths and weaknesses. An example of this is that I often fail to elaborate enough on connecting my ideas. If I have a train of thought in my head and I attempt to transcribe it into writing, sometimes I will miss a crucial detail or elaboration that would be better to include. My peers have pointed this out, and now I know to proofread the logical coherence of my arguments more thoroughly. My instructor has also pointed out some flaws in my style of writing and I have corrected them since. For example, even though I am familiar with "college-level" academic writing language, sometimes I still find myself defaulting or falling back onto more simple language. Now I am much more aware of this pitfall that I used to fall victim to quite often. 

The Rhetorical Analysis essay was a relatively rigid assignment with a strict format, but the RIP Project gave us lots more freedom. For my RIP Project, I decided to create a transcription of someone sharing and reading a collection of poems about the Western genre. I chose to use this unique format because it allowed me to have much more creative freedom as I could write a wide variety of poems all with different styles, themes, and points of view. I believe that I conveyed my rhetoric quite well through my RIP Project. If I had more time with the project, I would probably try to get more feedback from my peers and instructor, going through some more drafts.

The two main texts we read for this course were the short story "Fire in the Hole" by Leonard Elmore as well as No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. As my first time being exposed to the Neo-Western genre, I found "Fire in the Hole" very interesting. I wish I could remark more detailedly on my thoughts about the book, but this was during a very troubling and confusing time of online school, so I wasn't properly able to discuss the book in depth with my peers and instructor. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading the book and its "no-nonsense" and gunfight showdown themes. No Country for Old Men was very interesting as well. The character Moss was particularly intriguing to me, and I was so fascinated by his moral ambiguity that it ended up being a core part of my Rhetorical Analysis essay. Elements and ideas from both books were also incorporated into several poems in my RIP Project.

These assignments improved and refined my ability to write persuasive and rhetorical works. Whether explicit or implicit, rhetorical analysis is an incredibly deep and multifaceted topic with lots of nuances, so every bit of experience with the field will help tremendously in the long run. Rhetoric is a skill that is useful in almost every field, whether I'm negotiating with my boss about an important decision or writing a letter of appeal. 

I believe that with all this into consideration, as well as my significant improvement over the course of this program despite the extraneous circumstances, I predict that I will be receiving an A for this portfolio.