I just submitted my portfolio, yay. It consists of my Profile and Feature, because I work at a newspaper and edit, revise, and sometimes write more articles per week than any sane person should have to (people who work at daily newspapers are clearly insane). Plus, I like people and my Profile and Feature were both interview-based and thus way more interesting to write. They feel more relevant to me. And I think they turned out well.
I have always enjoyed writing personal reflections, as I find out that I know/learned stuff I didn't know that I know/learned before writing. I also always end up writing weird stuff, so I might as well continue that trend in this even-more-informal-than-the-reflective-preface blog post. Probably nobody will read it except Doug, anyway.
This class was sort of a trip in which I was a little lost and confused wandering through it but then at the end all of the deep meaning snuck up from behind and hit me in the face. And then I was like, "Whoa, trippy, dude. I like, learned stuff."
So I guess you could say it was a success.
I had fun formatting my final portfolio pieces in InDesign, writing looks so much cooler when it has pictures and neat boundaries and not double-spaced Times New Roman 12-point font. It's like you can forget about what the writing says and just enjoy the aesthetic quality of it. I also drew a cartoon for one and a rudimentary diagram for the other, which was fun. It turns out I can do art stuff too!
As far as the actual writing, though, I'm not sure what I can say that's not obvious, so here's my ideology: A piece of writing is never finished, and if you let some time pass in between writing and revising you can always improve it. Nothing is perfect on the first draft, and it always improves when more people read it and provide feedback.
For that, I'd like to shout out to my writing group for having my back, especially Michelle for reading my Feature when I finally finished it over a week late and giving me feedback the same night that I uploaded a draft to D2L.
The writing in my portfolio is by no means perfect, but it's better than it was before.
I will continue to pursue science-y writing, I'm sure. I had a good time learning stuff in this class. It's been a good trip, dude.
