Blog Post 4. Revision Reflection.

    I’ve been revising my portfolio ever since the quarter began. I’ve been spending free time, time on weekends, time up late at night, and time I really should have been spending studying organic chemistry on portfolio revisions, site improvements, and other small optimizations. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t spend a single minute of my free time taking school-related work outside of the classroom. I find most of it boring and see it as just another requirement to check off on my path to graduating and getting the hell out of school. However, this writing portfolio is different. I feel more of a connection to it because it’s mine. I chose the topic, did the investigation, and built the website. Because of that, it’s been easier to spend a ton of time working on it.

    By this point, I’ve already done a lot of technical optimizations to the site by editing the Weebly HTML theme templates and Less stylesheets. I’m no expert at that stuff, but my determination to improve this site has continued to drive me forward, so I’ve burned up hours on that alone. On the writing side, I have been heavily revising my personal bio throughout the past couple weeks. I started out with grand visions for it but ended up producing a rough draft that I thought made me sound incredibly boastful and full of myself. Definitely not what I’d envisioned. While editing, I aimed to cut out purple prose, remove irrelevant details about my past, and change my tone of voice to sound less arrogant. While I wouldn’t call my personal bio excellent as it stands now, it is at least a step up from what I uploaded a couple weeks ago, and I’m pretty satisfied with it. I’ve also been thinking about making some small changes to certain details in my project proposal. I haven’t uploaded any of those changes yet, but when I do, the proposal will lose a bit of unnecessary fluff and will more accurately describe my work this quarter. I’m definitely going to change the section about the writing portfolio’s intended audience, which needs some corrections. I might even add a multimodal element to the webpage.

    Now, onto the stuff that lies ahead. I intend to incorporate Joe’s comments on my problem and solution essay as soon as possible. I want to make my personal bio more interesting, with an introductory hook, perhaps. I want a kick-ass introduction that adequately conveys the interest I have in my topic and lays out how, as I have added to and built up this writing portfolio, the writing portfolio has built me up and helped me improve my writing skills as well. I still have a lot of web design work to do with my homepage. Not looking forward to slogging through that. Throughout all of this, I’ve found that the content in the readings on revision by Nancy Sommers and Sandra Giles have resonated with me. The ideas in both pieces complement each other pretty well; they talk about how one ought to go back and repeatedly apply self-reflection to each aspect of their writing, making revision a continuous, recursive process, rather than something that occurs in discrete steps. I’d say that, without even knowing it for all this time, I’ve been engaging in that kind of process. Also, I relate to Giles’ story about being a hoop-jumper and just telling the teacher what they want to hear! I’ve done that before with assignments I’ve been bored with. Fortunately, I’ve been interested in the writing I’ve been doing this quarter, so I’ve been able to write and revise based on my true thoughts with zero hoop-jumping. In the coming weeks, I will continue my revisions with that same drive.

    Edit: I forgot to link in an outside source that's been helpful to me during my revision process. That was one of the blog post assignment requirements. I'm a little late on that, but I figured I'd do it anyway. This is an article from the New York Times which has contributed to my revisions in a couple different ways. I've sought to emulate the tone of the writing; I've really been trying to nail the laid-back news reporter vibe present in this article with my own writing and revision. Also, I drew inspiration for modeling my homepage from the webpage this article is on. Especially with how I did the wide image and caption.