March 9th, 2021
Welcome to my writing portfolio for UWP 101Y Winter Quarter 2021. On
this site, you’ll find a catalog of all of the writing assignments I’ve
done over this past quarter for this class. The aim of this class was to
facilitate improvement in writing, revising, planning, multimodal
source integration, and citation via deep investigation of and writing
about a topic of our choice. My topic was urban redevelopment in the San
Francisco Bay Area, and I had a blast writing about it this quarter.
You can access all my writings using the navbar above. They’re arranged in chronological order of completion (mostly). We’ve got my Project Proposal first, in which I put forth my choice of topic, talk about what it means to me, and prepare to write about it. There’s my Problem and Solution, in which I clarify a problem related to my topic and advocate for a solution. After that, there’s my About the Author, a personal bio about who I am and what the purpose of this portfolio is. Finally, my Writing Blog is up there too. The blog is a collection of writing updates from all throughout the quarter.
In the beginning, back when I’d just finished my proposal, the thought of writing about Bay Area urban redevelopment was just an underdeveloped, nebulous blob in my mind. In terms of details and hard evidence, I knew just about nothing. As I progressed onwards from there, however, I learned more and more about my topic, and not even just out of necessity. I found my interest in the topic deepen on its own. Investigating the topic and gathering evidence was a requirement for the class, sure. But it wasn’t so difficult to do. It got easier and easier the longer and longer I engaged with it and the longer I spent writing about it. I’m still no expert on the topic, but I can safely say: as my knowledge in the topic increased, my enthusiasm for the topic increased as well, and the two complemented each other. Similarly, as I progressed from assignment to assignment, I found it easier to speak using my own voice. By the time I reached the About the Author assignment, I was comfortably writing with a voice that’s almost like how I speak in real life. I’ve been taught to suppress my voice or make it more formal and refined in other classes. It’s a good thing to be able to do that. Some forms of writing benefit from a cold, composed author. However, I feel like years of doing that has made me less comfortable writing like I talk in real life, using my own voice. This class was different—it put the reins in my hands. What drove me forward was my own interest in my own topic, and I got to make my own creative and stylistic choices on assignments and portfolio design, so why not get comfortable writing in my own voice too?
Multimodal writing is also something I’m not terribly familiar with. In other classes, we mostly just write up massive walls of text. Sometimes there’s a pie chart somewhere. Maybe a photograph or two. In this class, however, we’ve been made to think more deeply about different types of multimodal sources, what purposes those sources serve, and how to effectively integrate them into writing. You can see me coming in at full force with this in my Problem and Solution essay, where I integrate a video up front. I’ve never integrated a video into a piece of writing for school before in my life. How crazy is that?
There was also the task of revision. This class preached to us the importance of revision as a continuous process rather than a set of steps to be strictly followed, a different approach from what I’ve been taught in the past. For me, this form of revision came very naturally. As I cycled through all the writing in my portfolio, I just repeatedly asked myself, “What is the purpose of this piece of writing? What is the purpose of this webpage? How does it fit in with the rest of the portfolio?” Like Nancy Sommers said in “Intentions and Revisions,” revision is a recursive process. It feeds into itself and inspires even further revision. Revision occurs best when it isn’t bound so strictly by rules. I sure felt that way when I was revising. My process was less a set of steps and more a constant, meticulous tweaking of little details over a long period of time. These revisions include grammatical and spelling fixes (of course), the restructuring of paragraphs, omissions of extraneous information, a bit of rewriting, and lots of word count trimming. I also did a ton of revising in terms of the design of the website to get to how it looks now. While those edits weren’t directly related to the writing, I found that the same process of continuous, recursive revision applied anyway.
There are only ten weeks in a quarter, so I’ve got to wrap up work on this portfolio now. I’m the kind of person who is never satisfied with anything I work on; I feel the need to keep editing and revising, never finalizing. In this way, the end of the quarter is a good thing. It’s forcing me to be satisfied with what I’ve put out so far. If I were given more time, I’d probably keep revising and making little changes to everything. I would go revisit Hunters Point and shoot some photographs of what the shipyard and surroundings look like now, since I forgot to take pictures of the neighborhood the last time I was there. I’d find some way to integrate those into my writing as multimodal elements. I would also spend a lot more time watching recordings of city council meetings regarding Hunters Point Shipyard. I remember those being very interesting and insightful. It’s just that those meetings stretch on for hours, so I didn’t have enough time to sit there and absorb everything that went on in them.
Constructing this website was one of the most enjoyable assignments I’ve ever done as a student. I’d probably also go ahead and rank it highly on the list of assignments most beneficial to my own personal growth and learning. You can read more about how I feel this website will contribute to my personal and professional goals on my About the Author page, but in short, it allowed me to learn about and write about a crucially important topic of my choice through the medium of the Internet while sharpening my skills as a writer. Now, enough from me. Go check out my writing and leave a comment on the blog about it.
You can access all my writings using the navbar above. They’re arranged in chronological order of completion (mostly). We’ve got my Project Proposal first, in which I put forth my choice of topic, talk about what it means to me, and prepare to write about it. There’s my Problem and Solution, in which I clarify a problem related to my topic and advocate for a solution. After that, there’s my About the Author, a personal bio about who I am and what the purpose of this portfolio is. Finally, my Writing Blog is up there too. The blog is a collection of writing updates from all throughout the quarter.
In the beginning, back when I’d just finished my proposal, the thought of writing about Bay Area urban redevelopment was just an underdeveloped, nebulous blob in my mind. In terms of details and hard evidence, I knew just about nothing. As I progressed onwards from there, however, I learned more and more about my topic, and not even just out of necessity. I found my interest in the topic deepen on its own. Investigating the topic and gathering evidence was a requirement for the class, sure. But it wasn’t so difficult to do. It got easier and easier the longer and longer I engaged with it and the longer I spent writing about it. I’m still no expert on the topic, but I can safely say: as my knowledge in the topic increased, my enthusiasm for the topic increased as well, and the two complemented each other. Similarly, as I progressed from assignment to assignment, I found it easier to speak using my own voice. By the time I reached the About the Author assignment, I was comfortably writing with a voice that’s almost like how I speak in real life. I’ve been taught to suppress my voice or make it more formal and refined in other classes. It’s a good thing to be able to do that. Some forms of writing benefit from a cold, composed author. However, I feel like years of doing that has made me less comfortable writing like I talk in real life, using my own voice. This class was different—it put the reins in my hands. What drove me forward was my own interest in my own topic, and I got to make my own creative and stylistic choices on assignments and portfolio design, so why not get comfortable writing in my own voice too?
Multimodal writing is also something I’m not terribly familiar with. In other classes, we mostly just write up massive walls of text. Sometimes there’s a pie chart somewhere. Maybe a photograph or two. In this class, however, we’ve been made to think more deeply about different types of multimodal sources, what purposes those sources serve, and how to effectively integrate them into writing. You can see me coming in at full force with this in my Problem and Solution essay, where I integrate a video up front. I’ve never integrated a video into a piece of writing for school before in my life. How crazy is that?
There was also the task of revision. This class preached to us the importance of revision as a continuous process rather than a set of steps to be strictly followed, a different approach from what I’ve been taught in the past. For me, this form of revision came very naturally. As I cycled through all the writing in my portfolio, I just repeatedly asked myself, “What is the purpose of this piece of writing? What is the purpose of this webpage? How does it fit in with the rest of the portfolio?” Like Nancy Sommers said in “Intentions and Revisions,” revision is a recursive process. It feeds into itself and inspires even further revision. Revision occurs best when it isn’t bound so strictly by rules. I sure felt that way when I was revising. My process was less a set of steps and more a constant, meticulous tweaking of little details over a long period of time. These revisions include grammatical and spelling fixes (of course), the restructuring of paragraphs, omissions of extraneous information, a bit of rewriting, and lots of word count trimming. I also did a ton of revising in terms of the design of the website to get to how it looks now. While those edits weren’t directly related to the writing, I found that the same process of continuous, recursive revision applied anyway.
There are only ten weeks in a quarter, so I’ve got to wrap up work on this portfolio now. I’m the kind of person who is never satisfied with anything I work on; I feel the need to keep editing and revising, never finalizing. In this way, the end of the quarter is a good thing. It’s forcing me to be satisfied with what I’ve put out so far. If I were given more time, I’d probably keep revising and making little changes to everything. I would go revisit Hunters Point and shoot some photographs of what the shipyard and surroundings look like now, since I forgot to take pictures of the neighborhood the last time I was there. I’d find some way to integrate those into my writing as multimodal elements. I would also spend a lot more time watching recordings of city council meetings regarding Hunters Point Shipyard. I remember those being very interesting and insightful. It’s just that those meetings stretch on for hours, so I didn’t have enough time to sit there and absorb everything that went on in them.
Constructing this website was one of the most enjoyable assignments I’ve ever done as a student. I’d probably also go ahead and rank it highly on the list of assignments most beneficial to my own personal growth and learning. You can read more about how I feel this website will contribute to my personal and professional goals on my About the Author page, but in short, it allowed me to learn about and write about a crucially important topic of my choice through the medium of the Internet while sharpening my skills as a writer. Now, enough from me. Go check out my writing and leave a comment on the blog about it.