Sebin's Portfolio
About my major projects...
When you play a video game such as a role playing game, the more you fight with enemies no matter whether you win or you get badly hurt, your level and strength is slowly upgraded. I swear that these three main projects were the longest writing I’ve ever accomplished in my entire life. However, I never got frustrated and stressed out about them because all the topics were very interesting to me and it gave me a chance to think about those topics very deeply. Moreover, practicing to put things together for a complete cohesive paper definitely has upgraded my writing skills. If I was at a level 2 by writing over twenty of my lab reports, these three projects raised my writing level to 4! Now, I know which genre can perfectly match in order to best express my opinion, ideas, and observation based on the audience and the purpose of the writing.
The first project was ‘literacy’. Being literate in things could be an easy subject because everybody learns something and become literate in that at some point in their lives. I chose learning English and American culture for my literacy project because that was the most drastic change in my life and it was meaningful to deal with it while looking back on my progress on that topic. I wanted to present it in a more unique way therefore I chose a newspaper type of writing. In this way I thought that my long story can make up for any boringness the audience experienced. When I write my rough draft, I just wrote it like my essay because I only considered what contents will be in my newspaper. Therefore, I had to go through to making another draft for the newspaper itself with the voice of a journalist. I realized that a rough draft was not a simple task, but that it should have a somewhat close form to the final outcome.
The second project was a genre analysis for resumes. I still think that this project was the worst work so far. At that time, I looked up much information regarding resumes online. However, I couldn’t combine all the content cohesively for one set of writing. The reason for that could be because I did not write a serious rough draft. I also tried to put citation, but I was not well aware of citation so I mimicked APA citation instead of following the exact rules of APA style citation. My purpose for the project was good but my writing couldn’t express what I wanted to say and it was a lot off from the basic writing rule. Therefore, if I have more time, I would like to revise it for smoother flow, more cohesive arrangement, and perfect APA citation. I believe this experience of failure also became a base for me to grow in writing though.
My favorite and project I’m most proud of is the third project, the ‘ethnography’. I was very upset sometimes when my husband friends made fun of my husband as if he was pathetic due to marriage life; I was not sure whether or not they were joking or serious. One stone, two birds! From the ethnography, I could finish my ethnography with an interesting subject as well as actually find out if they were jealous so they teased my husband. The result was pretty amazing that they also wanted to be married but were still preparing and it was not easy to meet the right partner. By using the lab report style format for this project, I had more confidence and my rough draft was pretty close to the format of the final paper. I read my rough draft over and over again and shaped them based on Dr. Rand’s advice. I also searched approximately over 50 times to follow exact APA style citation. Upon finishing my work, I was exhausted but when I read it again when I was in a comfortable mood, I was happy because it was not professional but at least it expressed what I wanted to say to my audience.