William Whitmire

5/3/17
Final Portfolio
Introduction
When taking a quick glance at the home page of my final portfolio website you will see a stock

photo with a man standing on a rock looking towards the horizon. The text on this page explain

that I want to take the audience on a journey. My logic behind this is that in this course I felt as

though I went on an academic journey and that each assignment added to my skill set. So, when

creating this site instead of trying to present information in the way it was in class I relied on my

own logic to tell my own personal academic journey through my work in this course. For many,

logic simply means reasoning. To understand a persons logic, we try to find the structure of their

reasoning. Logic is not synonymous with fact or truth, though facts are part of evidence in

logical argumentation (Jones). Jones is not the strongest believer in logic in here article but I

disagree I think for a project like this final portfolio making a good argument is all subjective on

the personal logic that said author wants to use. Therefore, I want to walk you through my logic

for each element of my final portfolio and hope that you walk away with a deeper understanding

of all that I gained from this course.

Webpage
The first webpage of my final portfolio is titled becoming ONE with your audience. I

decided on this title because I think that it sums up the what I learned in the first section of the

class. On the page, you will see my first short assignment and blog post and no major project

quite yet I did this because I want to truly take the audience on a journey. By only including

shorth assignment and a blog post I am getting the audiences feet wet to the content like how

these assignments did to me in the beginning of the semester. The blog post and short

assignments were not revised very heavily in terms of content because I wanted to show the

reader the journey my quality of work went through during the course. This was a tough decision
to not heavily edit these assignments throughout my portfolio because I thought heavily on

Killingsworth and Palmers words on Human interest. Human interest is the leading factor in

determining what scientific activities will be covered as big stories (Killingsworth and Palmer).

they go on to say it insists that science must have social value outside of its own pursuits, that

science cannot dwell within its own history but must make connections with the larger history of

human kind (Killingsworth and Palmer). I asked myself several times should I compromise

displaying my academic journey in order to present a shining virtually new piece of work that

viewers may be a little bit more interested in reading. I eventually deiced that showing my

development in the course showed more of a journey and fit the theme I was going for and was a

big reason why I only did grammatical and small argument changes in my short assignments and

blog post throughout the portfolio. But I did compromise a little here I also added what I like to

call creators notes that serve as a way to reflect on each assignment and how it contributed to

my development over the course, I thought this would provide some interest to viewers and keep

that human-interest element alive in my work.

On the next page, titled Editing and Analyzing which I thought the projects on

this page were really fit into this section of the course. Here I explain briefly what this unit

entailed and include my sci/tech/health blog and my Wikipedia project. These projects are

heavily revised for content and grammar and in my eyes, are completely new pieces of work

because they use some of the skills that I learned after this unit of the course. But I dont think

that it takes away from showing my academic journey and development because the short

assignment and blog post still are revised and can show that development. Also on this page you

will see that I included link to the projects instead of posting them directly on the site. I found

this to add a creative component and help play on that journey theme because a viewer could

click and explore more content. This page to me serves as cross road of sorts. I think this page
would either invite the audience to explore further or overwhelm them and turn them off.

Killingsworth explains these example as a moment where a decision, needing to be made;

decisive action is required (Killingworth). I see this as a cross road because it was a personal

cross road for me in this course. before doing these two projects I wasnt doing my work for this

course so I had a decision to make to step it up or give up. I came to this cross road because of

the grades I was getting on my previous work was not the grades I was use to and the future

work seemed to be so much harder. This was my personal rhetorical crises and I am happy that I

was able to kind of create that in my website.

The two webpages on this portfolio are dedicated to more analysis which I thought was a

main component of this course and outline that to viewers. And finally, to Bring it all home

which was the final lesson I learned in the course which was to bring all the public discourse

techniques that I learned and applying them to the documentary project. This page drew a lot of

inspiration from grant Davie article on audience. Grant Davie describes audience in the

following way Audience as a rhetorical concept has transcended the idea of a homogenous

body of people who have stable characteristics and are assembled in the rhetor's presence. A

discourse may have primary and secondary audiences, audiencesthat are present and those that

have yet to form, audiences that act collaboratively or as individuals, audiences about

whom the rhetor knows little, or audiences that exist only in the rhetor's mind (Davie). These

are the considerations I made in my whole portfolio yes but focused on it in the final two web

pages because I wanted to be sure that the audience could see how all the assignments tied into

one another and I think that was accomplished on the final two pages of my website.
Reflection of Semester
All in all, I think that this semester really helped me grow as a writer but also at crafting

arguments. Crafting a good argument was one of the goals that I wanted to accomplish in this

course and I believe that I have accomplished that. What I learned in this course will follow me
for the rest of my life in my future as an Attorney and maybe one day as an elected official.

Being able to craft a well throughout argument that takes audience, ethics, rhetoric and other

factors into consideration will be invaluable in the future and I am so grateful to have learned

such an important lesson for my future career in this course. This class was tough at time do not

get me wrong. There were times that I wanted to pack it up and just give up but I kept pushing

forward and I am glad I did. And if you were ever faced with the same challenge I implore you to

keep pushing and never give up because you never know what you will learn in the end.

Works Cited
Davie, Keith Grant. "Rhtorical Situations and Their Consituents ." Taylor & Francis
Group (1997): 264-279. Journal .
Jones, Rebecca. Finding a good argument or why bother with logic. 2010.
Killingsworth and Palmer. Ecospeak . Chicago: Southern Illinois University Press , n.d.
Book .
Killingworth. Appeals to modern time . Southern Illonios University Press , n.d.
Book .