The first homework assignment that really impacted my final portfolio was the 3 literary artifacts post. When I came into this class I did not really know what to expects, so when I saw an assignment like this I waited till four or five people had posted the assignment before I began mine. When those first couple of posts came in I realized that the assignment was kind of a fun assignment that allowed for freedom to write. I began trying to think of important literary artifacts in my life and when I finally had three good ones I began to write. I chose this as one of my most important homework assignment because this was one of the first posts I ever wrote and yet I used most of the ideas I talked about in this post at some point during the year. When I went to write my first blog post, that was the first assignment I went to. I used that blog as the starting point for brainstorming and I was amazed at how such a simple post had, such and impact on my future writing. I just wrote my final portfolio on a topic form post from the first week of class. I showed me that I could write my papers on anything, even if they are not directly related to class and I think that skill returns when I write papers both inside and outside of our class.
My second assignment that really impacted my final portfolio was the long interview assignment. While it was not a single post, it was a single assignment and I learned a lot about the people around me through it. I was not a big fan of the discourse communities unit. I found it a bit dry and too broad to be a good topic, but the interview made it interesting. I learned about the different way people communicate and I have used some of those ideas in my paper. In my final portfolio, I used a passage from my college essay and I used a quote from Matt’s blog. These ideas were directly derived from the interview homework assignment. I used those methods of writing in order to try to connect to students who do not participate in the same discourse community as me. When I quoted Matt I was thinking about how I quoted works of people in the interviews and used them to make my paper better. If you only use quotes from scholars than you are at risk of boring your audience, but if you incorporate work form their peers, they are more inclined to read further and deeper into your post.
My third assignment that really impacted my final portfolio was the comparison between Orwell, Rose, and Howard. I enjoyed writing this post because it allowed me to freely compare 3 of the scholars whose work we had read and compare them directly. I learned a lot from the comparison and able to use those comparison’s as good and bad examples of sampling. When you compared the 3 authors you realized that they were all talking about the same thing, but they all were describing different approaches to it. I used this Idea towards the end of my blog post and I would never had been able to make that comparison if I had not done that blog post. The idea of sampling was confusing when I first read about it, but as I wrote my blog post and read others students, it made a lot more sense and I became familiar enough with it to use it effectively in a blog post. Many people I talked to found the post hard, but I really enjoyed it and I am happy I did it.
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