PW 5000 Portfolio Reflection Letter

Jesse Ports

Professor Watman

PW 5000 - Professional Writing and Rhetoric

10/18/10



                                                                                Portfolio Reflective Letter

         This course has helped me develop my understanding of what professional writing can be. Coming in, I mostly thought of the field as editors, those who take the ideas of more “technical” employees and improve the prose, flow and grammatical accuracy of the final document. Of course, this is a part of it, but the concept of authoring and using creative techniques makes the profession much more enticing. I’m hoping that this portfolio can be a starting point for me to showcase my abilities as an author, using my own experience and rhetorical abilities to transform any type of document into a more effective form of communication that will benefit both the creator and the reader.

         At the beginning of this course, I honestly didn’t know all that much about rhetoric. The textbook mentioned that most people think of it as “flowery, ornamental speech” (Peeples 11), and I’ll admit I was one of those people. After the initial readings, however, I felt that I had a much better grasp on the subject, both in theory and practice. Most of my writing experience falls into two categories: creative writing or college/high school papers. My creative writing projects, whether for a class or on my own time, generally include similar themes. I like to use humor, usually of a very dry and dark variety, and also other subjects such as violence and foul language that are certainly not for everyone and are focused on a specific type of audience. My scholarly writing projects have been quite the opposite: very straightforward, keeping my own voice out of them except to present an articulate, well-planned presentation of whatever thesis I have for the project. I have been successful with both categories, but these two poles encompassed the majority of my knowledge of writing. Studying rhetoric has started to change that; it’s allowed me to envision a multitude of situations that might arise in a professional writing field that would call for something in between, for a document that needs not just a bland retelling but a creative authoring, using my own abilities to make the document more effective while keeping the audience in mind to know when to emphasize my influence and when to diminish my voice in the product.

         The assignments for this course really helped me develop my writing skills towards that goal of becoming an author in a professional setting. The documents I created are not things that would likely come up in an actual workplace situation, but the way I wrote them was a good first step in learning how to apply rhetoric in a subtle manner to a variety of situations.  The first assignment was perfect for me – a chance to write a short story that explained the elements of rhetoric, our primary topic of discussion for the course. I felt that I was able to create a plausible scenario in which the characters explained the origins and basics of rhetoric while simultaneously having them use those rhetorical skills in a commonplace and somewhat humorous way (i.e., picking up girls in a bar). I was a bit amused that I was able to incorporate a conversation about Aristotle’s distinction between atechnic and entechnic proofs (Peeples 28) into a how-to guide to drunken socializing. This was fun to write, and working discussions of rhetoric into the story helped me to understand them better myself and to really get a grasp on the subject as I moved forward in the course.

         My next assignment was just as fun to write. When asked to create a manifesto that inspired a team of writers to become agents for organizational change, I was hesitant; I didn’t have much experience in a typical professional setting. I decided to write one for a group of writers on a “Jersey Shore”-type TV show. I was able to work in some humor in this project as well, because anything involved with this type of show is guaranteed to be absurd. It was both enjoyable and a learning experience to figure out how a writer on a trashy reality show can use organizationally situated action to affect all aspects of the show and even the company as a whole. I encouraged these hypothetical writers to work to gain the social and situational authority we had discussed in class (Peeples 125) to improve their standing within the department and advance their careers. The assignment, although a bit surreal and at times too cynical and sarcastic (which I tried to tone down in the final draft), did help to reinforce my understanding of how I could manifest change in my own workplace someday by involving myself in all aspects of the production process.

         The third assignment was a change of pace: we were asked to improve a document or website that already existed. I had some difficulty in finding any ordinary documents that I cared about enough to change, but in the end I settled on improving the main webpage for an upcoming Oktoberfest event. This idea occurred to me because I happened to be going to such an event that very weekend. The actual event I attended had a very well done webpage, which was partly what attracted me to it when I was googling Oktoberfests and beerfests in September. I figured that not all events could be so well advertised, and I was right; it didn’t take long for me to find another, similar event held in Myrtle Beach that appeared bland and uninspired. I had a bit of trouble with formatting at first, but in the end was able to create a page that combined my own ideas about what a beerfest should contain with influences from the one I was actually attending, and I think my final product was definitely an improvement over the original advertisement. My project was assuming that I would have some input in the planning of the beerfest, however, because besides just reorganizing and formatting the original webpage, I added in descriptions of some extra features and events that were not originally included. Overall, because it focused mostly on design and not prose, I think that this project was my least favorite, although it was still helpful because redesigning a flyer or webpage is not something in which I am well-experienced.

         The final assignment was our own choice, and I decided to do the first assignment at the end of our chapter on ethics (Peeples 218). This chapter was of particular interest to me, because in my own work experience I have already found many occasions in which I had to make a distinction between what was good for my boss or my company and what was good morally. In a professional writing career, I am sure that this ethical distinction arises quite often; there are times when ethical writing and ethical living seem to be two separate systems. I really liked Porter’s dismissal of this separation. He emphasized that “values and language use [are] inextricably bound (Peeples 202), and reminded readers that “at the point when you begin to write, you begin to define yourself ethically” (Peeples 203). I agree with his statements, and while there are gray areas in which it is hard to determine the morals of a writing decision, it is clear that when a situation occurs where someone’s writing would be helping the company but is ethically wrong, it is not okay to put aside those ethical considerations and say that they are “just doing their job.”

        The two articles I discussed as a part of this free choice project were Just’s recommendation on how to improve the Nazi death vans used to exterminate Jews (Peeples 183) and Stephen’s memo on the testing of an aircraft engine component (Peeples 177). In the end I decided that both documents were unethical and needed more ethical deliberation in order to rewrite them in a way that was morally responsible, but the degrees to which these documents strayed from my own understanding of ethics differed significantly. Just’s memo showed the way in which rhetorical abilities can be used in a truly horrific way; he described the slaughter of innocent people as if he were recommending how to dispose of excess garbage, and although his argument is rhetorically sound there is no doubt that his message is ethically despicable, even evil. The other memo is a trickier judgment call. Stephen is known as a good writer because he knows how to play the political games with his superiors, writing things that are technically true but hide or mislead part of the situation in order to keep his employers and customers happy and avoid a backlash of disappointment. What he is doing is not necessarily neglecting his responsibilities as a writer, but if Porter’s system of ethics is taken into account, Stephen would need to consider his own personal ethics when crafting this document and decide if the right thing would be to tell the full truth, risking short-term anger and disappointment from his employers to avoid a more costly issue that the end users might face down the line.

      All of these projects were helpful in developing my understanding of each section we discussed in class. The topic of the module discussions were very useful as well. In an online course it can be difficult to really get a back and forth conversation going to move the scope of learning beyond the basic information we get from the text. The requirements for posting responses to the Professor’s and each other’s posts, while not extremely demanding, were enough to give us a push to get the discussion going, and I was able to learn a lot about both the theory and practical applications of our subjects both from reading other’s responses and thinking critically about my own responses.

      One of the aspects of this class I particularly appreciated was the freedom it allowed. We were able to take discussions in a multitude of directions, moving the conversation forward with each input from a classmate. This freedom of expression extended to the projects as well. I recently mentioned to a friend of mine that my first three projects in my professional writing course were about picking up girls in a bar, jersey shore (or at least a knock-off) and beer; I joked that I was “winning grad school so far.” The reality is that the open-ended assignments were the best possible thing for me in getting back to school after a brief layoff. I was able to use my creativity and skills that were already familiar to increase my understanding of a new subject, and if I had been forced to write boring, one-dimensional reports on the basic theory of rhetoric I would not have learned nearly as much.

    This portfolio is the final aspect of the course, tying all of the projects together into a cohesive presentation of my writing abilities. I chose this site because I am not very familiar with making a website, and Writing.com, which was suggested by another classmate, is extremely user-friendly and made the portfolio much more manageable. I do wish that it had more options for format, coloring, etc., and for the other, more extensive portfolios I’ll have to do during this program I still plan to look around for a different website that might better suit my needs. In the end, even though Writing.com doesn’t allow for a particularly flashy presentation, it does give me a format to clearly display my current collection of graduate writing projects, accomplishing the main goal of this introductory course.







                                                                                          Works Cited

Peeples, Tim. Professional Writing and Rhetoric: Readings From the Field. New York: Longman. 2003.