Writing and Communication Mini Portfolio Essay

When it came to my major, I felt that writing and communications skills were commonly
focused on for the majority of the classes I took. I had to read articles and then proceed to
interpret them in my own words. What was the author trying to say? What was the meaning?
Purpose? And how can you apply it to the real world or your own personal life? Since there
were a lot of scholarly articles we had to read I believe I got quite good at doing this learning
objective. There are two articles in particular that I found were the best at communicating my
purpose and findings based on scholarly material.

The first article I want to look at is from my Interdisciplinary Inquiry class in which we
had to write papers called “Link papers”. There were about nine that we did in total throughout
the quarter but I want to refer to one in particular that I felt was my favorite as it was something
that I was interested to learn more about. The Link paper was the 5th one and what I had to do
was discuss how politics can affect schools negatively. I remember each week when we had to
write these papers there was a variety of media and articles to look at. I watch a short
documentary, read an article, and listen to a podcast that all discussed the same issues just in
different ways. It was then up to me to compile what I learned from each one and condense it
into a two paged paper. I think it’s sometimes hard to compile information when you have a lot
at once but I felt that I effectively got my point across and used references properly to prove my
point. I also made sure my citations were correct and gave a reference page.

The second article is another essay that I wrote for my Media and Communications
class. The paper focused on the concept of hegemony which was taught throughout the course
of the class. I had to compare two magazine covers of an NFL star and describe in detail the
significance of what's on the cover as well as compare it to real-life hegemonic struggles in the
NFL. This paper was very long as I also had to tie in other components that I felt I saw within the
media and research about it. I was successfully able to develop ideas and claims based on
research and what was taught in class. I felt I was able to communicate my own interpretation of
the cover and football as a whole. My teacher was very impressed by my work and liked how I
added my own ideas such as toxic masculinity and patriotism. She was able to understand the
main argument in my paper and felt it flowed well together with its structure. Overall, I believe
this learning objective of being aware of the interconnected relationships between purpose,
audience, author, and context is something that I naturally had done in my major.