Rough Reflection on Final Portfolio

This portfolio was put together to highlight several areas that I feel are very strong in my writing. Each piece shows a different aspect of writing style, and together they give a pretty good picture of my overall writing skills.

The collaborative project highlights my versatility as a writer. It begins with an essay written by me that serves as an argumentative piece setting up the argument for the whole project. In this piece I use research by Jonah Lehrer in the book “How we decide” to create an argument for religion being inseparable from our decisions, and by extension politics. I'm very proud of this piece- I think that the use of scientific research about how we actually make decisions lends a lot of strength to our overall argument. It makes the argument not about how people are biased, but about solid facts about how people's brains actually work, a much harder position to attack.

The second part of the collaborative project that I wrote is a satirical list of 10 more commandments, highlighting the areas where religion affects politics. I think that satire is probably my strongest genre- this piece goes a long way in making the audience really think about our argument. The last part that I did was a political cartoon; this again falls into the genre of satire, and again uses humor to pull the audience into our argument.

The next project in my portfolio is a rewrite of RP3. My original RP3 was not a very strong argument. It used some research to make the point that manned spaceflight is a goal that we need to pursue as a nation. The problem was, I focused on the broad issues, but not the issues that matter to most people, and as a result it wasn't very persuasive. In the rewrite, I brought themes from my RP4 to the piece, focusing on issues that have a more direct effect on the readers, such as budget and jobs provided. This resulted in the piece becoming much more effective for the intended audience.

I have not yet chosen the blog posts that I am going to use, but I plan on choosing those that highlight more of my strengths.