About My Portfolio
My eighteen-year-old self would never believe that by the time I was graduating college I would be crafting a writing portfolio I was actually proud of. I entered Wake Forest thinking that I would be a Chemistry major. I planned on going straight to medical school and being involved in everything science. Here I am four years later, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Biology and double minors in Chemistry and Interdisciplinary Writing. This portfolio is a testament to who I have become as a writer over the last four years as a result of what I have learned through the Writing minor. You will notice three categories of writing; Science, Argumentative, and Creative. Each of these categories features texts that I feel represent strengths I have developed as a writer over the last four years. The following paragraphs will walk you through my journey as a writer from high school through college. I will discuss the rhetorical skills I have come to understand and implement in my writing and, finally, explain what these skills contribute to my writing today.
As a high school student, I struggled with writing. Actually – it’s not so much that I struggled with writing, but more so that I struggled with the feedback I received on my essays. Typically filled with red underlines, checkmarks, or circles, I never knew what to do to make my writing better. The ambiguous “B-“became all-to-familiar, and did nothing to tell me what I was leaving out of my writing, what was holding me back from good writing.
I finally received some answers during my first semester of college when I took my introductory writing course. The course made the features of “good” writing explicit for me. I learned what cohesive ties were. I learned how to create a research space in my writing (CARS Model). I learned what it meant to leave room for opposing arguments (hedging) or to incorporate certainty (boosting) into my claims; and I learned how to formulate arguments that extended past the traditional five-paragraph essay format.
Fast forward to my senior year of college. By now I have collected a toolbox of rhetorical techniques to help guide my writing across disciplines. The interdisciplinary writing program has been crucial to my development as a writer in both the sciences and the humanities. As an aspiring doctor, one of the key components to my career – as with most careers – will be the ability to write effectively. While some introductory Biology courses have workshops that list-off the “how to’s” of writing lab reports, the workshops present writing as formulaic. In some cases, scientific writing can be formulaic, for example, the methods and materials section of a research report. But in all cases, as I have learned from my writing courses, scientific writing is about knowing how to appeal to your reader. So while these workshops may have presented some helpful hints, most of my understanding has come from the features I have studied in my Interdisciplinary Writing minor.
The rhetorical strategies that I have learned through my interdisciplinary writing courses have prepared me to be able to engage a reader not just in a variety of disciplines, but in a variety of genres within a discipline. In my portfolio you will find a project summary I wrote for a grant proposal leading into my junior year. This summary highlights my ability to utilize engagement strategies in a scientific context to show the importance of the research. For example, while discussing the background of the research, I assume my readers (biologists) are familiar with the term echolocation and am therefore able to 1) establish my own ethos as a member of the scientific community, and 2) bypass the risk of insulting my readers’ intelligence by over explaining the phenomenon.
Another genre of scientific writing you will find in my portfolio is a research report on purifying enzymes written for my Biochemistry lab. Many scientific journals now enforce page limits for researchers to publish their work. The research report contained data collected over the course of the semester and was presented according to formatting rules of Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC). The most challenging part of this assignment was figuring out how to present a large amount of information into only a few pages. Some rhetorical features you’ll notice in this piece are the use of hedging words such as may and suggests. These hedging words are important in scientific writing because the stakes in the natural sciences are quite high – meaning that is it difficult, and often rare, to prove that your research will always be correct. Additionally, you will notice that materials and methods, results, and discussion sections are follow the same series of events. Because the experiment consisted of multiple parts, it is useful to follow the same progression of experiments in each section. The parallel development in each section allows the paper to gain reproducibility, helping the reader follow the experiment clearly.
On the other hand, my portfolio also features writing from non-science classes (incase you were worried). Assignments from English, Creative Writing, and Journalism can also be found in my portfolio. These pieces demonstrate my ability to write in the humanities under a variety of genres: assignments such as research papers, text analyses, reviews, and short stories are all represented in the portfolio. Each of these genres utilize a different voice so that I may best appeal to the appropriate audience. My ability to adapt different voices can be seen in my two short stories. In my short stories I had to adapt a voice (literally) of a character that my audience would buy – however each of my short stories are written to different audiences. I would say that Autumn Under the Trees is written towards any individual who is looking for a quick, easy, whimsical read, whereas Black Friday is geared more towards young adults looking for mystery and suspense. These voices vary from my academic voice, in which I tend to assert myself as an intellect by following discipline and genre specific trends.
My hope is that the pieces I have included in my portfolio will reflect the genre awareness I have gained throughout my time at Wake Forest. A quote from the research of Berkenkotter and Huckin states “genre knowledge is therefore best conceptualized as a form of situated cognition embedded in disciplinary activities. […] a writer must understand the directions in which a field is developing and possess rhetorical savvy necessary for positioning their work within it.” This quote reflects one of the main takeaways I have learned as an Interdisciplinary Writing student. Being aware of the knowledge that underlies and is required of each genre and discipline is a major step of producing a successful text. The writing minor has helped me hone the ability to point out and name rhetorical moves when I see them, and also to understand the work that each rhetorical move does in a text. This knowledge has helped me create texts that fit genre standards by utilizing appropriate rhetorical moves in order to fulfil goal of the genre.
Another principle I have learned through the Interdisciplinary Writing minor is that good writing varies across disciplines and genres. In other words, there is no set standard that constitutes good writing. As I previously mentioned, understanding the goals of each genre and discipline, combined with the rhetorical knowledge of how to achieve those goals, is what leads to “good” or successful writing. This knowledge relates to Thaiss and Zawacki’s theories on writing development in disciplines. The writers present three stages of student writing development based on their research:
The third stage of writing development, Thaiss and Zawacki note, is not always reached by undergraduates during their collegiate careers. However, I feel as though the Interdisciplinary Writing minor has helped me reach this stage in my development. Being a science-minded individual, I like to see data before I utilize information. A few of my writing classes have presented me with the opportunity to learn about corpus linguistics. This linguistic research tool analyzes a large collection of language, or corpora, in both written and spoken contexts – and can be used to discern patterns of language use across disciplines. My introductory writing class introduced me to corpus linguistics almost immediately. I found this one of the most useful tools for learning writing standards across disciplines as I was able to see data for rhetorical strategy use in different areas of academia. One thing about me – I have always been able to be coached. Once I could recognize the purpose of rhetorical moves in different disciplines, I began to incorporate them into my own writing. Therefore, I consider corpus linguistic research to be a helpful tool in my own writing development, and a large part of creating my own understanding of the structures of different disciplines. While I do consider myself to be in the third stage of writing development, as posed by Thaiss and Zawacki, I also consider myself to still be learning. I recognize that I learn more about myself as a writer and the writing process each time I finish an assignment.
I think a huge benefit of the Interdisciplinary Writing minor is discovering what your strengths and weaknesses are as a writer. When I am able to recognize a strength, I try to incorporate more of those rhetorical moves into my writing. When I am able to recognize a weakness as a writer, I try to be more conscious of improving those weaknesses as I write. On reflection of my own writing in both Biology and Writing, I find that my strengths tend to include leaving room for uncertainty by using hedges and boosters and using cohesive ties to create texts that are coherent. Some things I am still working on improving are choosing accurate words as well as being concise. Some of the biggest challenges for me throughout my college career have been assignments that limit my writing to one or two pages. These assignments have led me to face my weaknesses head-on and helped me become a more flexible writer.
I have also learned that I am a writer who tends to be straightforward and academic in my approach to writing. Most of my papers include guiding phrases that let the reader know where I am planning on going next in my paper. For example, in my English essay about Mrs. Dalloway, I start one paragraph by saying “The first scene I will analyze is the introduction of Sally Seton.” After which, I do exactly that and nothing more. I believe this is a strong part of my writing because I clearly state my intentions to the reader and am to the point without adding any unnecessary or confusing details. My arguments are backed up with thorough research, which I present in objective or scholarly tones, which has helped me establish credibility throughout my work.
Presenting myself as a credible writer is something I value in all of my texts, and something I hope to continue improving in my future work. As an aspiring doctor, I understand that credibility and writing in a clear and precise manner are crucial to being successful in the medical field. Ultimately, as I move forward in my writing development, I will utilize the skills I have learned during my time as a Writing minor to help establish the ethos necessary for a successful medical career.
When I chose Wake Forest as my home four years ago, I knew that I would gain the scientific knowledge I needed to become an informed doctor. What I learned very quickly though was that Wake Forest would help me develop the skills I needed to share what I have learned. Writing in the sciences (and other disciplines) requires contributions of knowledge or ideas in order to facilitate learning among the community. The reader engagement strategies I have developed through the Writing minor have helped me learn to join the conversation and create writer-reader relationships throughout my texts. The dialogue every writer joins is one that I have learned is continuous. While my time as a student writer is coming to an end, I look forward to joining new academic discourse as I continue writing in the medical field. In all honestly, my high school self would not be excited to know that I had a lifetime of writing ahead of me. My twenty-two year old self now understands that writing is pervasive and necessary across all areas of academics - which I feel is reflected in the different categories of this portfolio.
As a high school student, I struggled with writing. Actually – it’s not so much that I struggled with writing, but more so that I struggled with the feedback I received on my essays. Typically filled with red underlines, checkmarks, or circles, I never knew what to do to make my writing better. The ambiguous “B-“became all-to-familiar, and did nothing to tell me what I was leaving out of my writing, what was holding me back from good writing.
I finally received some answers during my first semester of college when I took my introductory writing course. The course made the features of “good” writing explicit for me. I learned what cohesive ties were. I learned how to create a research space in my writing (CARS Model). I learned what it meant to leave room for opposing arguments (hedging) or to incorporate certainty (boosting) into my claims; and I learned how to formulate arguments that extended past the traditional five-paragraph essay format.
Fast forward to my senior year of college. By now I have collected a toolbox of rhetorical techniques to help guide my writing across disciplines. The interdisciplinary writing program has been crucial to my development as a writer in both the sciences and the humanities. As an aspiring doctor, one of the key components to my career – as with most careers – will be the ability to write effectively. While some introductory Biology courses have workshops that list-off the “how to’s” of writing lab reports, the workshops present writing as formulaic. In some cases, scientific writing can be formulaic, for example, the methods and materials section of a research report. But in all cases, as I have learned from my writing courses, scientific writing is about knowing how to appeal to your reader. So while these workshops may have presented some helpful hints, most of my understanding has come from the features I have studied in my Interdisciplinary Writing minor.
The rhetorical strategies that I have learned through my interdisciplinary writing courses have prepared me to be able to engage a reader not just in a variety of disciplines, but in a variety of genres within a discipline. In my portfolio you will find a project summary I wrote for a grant proposal leading into my junior year. This summary highlights my ability to utilize engagement strategies in a scientific context to show the importance of the research. For example, while discussing the background of the research, I assume my readers (biologists) are familiar with the term echolocation and am therefore able to 1) establish my own ethos as a member of the scientific community, and 2) bypass the risk of insulting my readers’ intelligence by over explaining the phenomenon.
Another genre of scientific writing you will find in my portfolio is a research report on purifying enzymes written for my Biochemistry lab. Many scientific journals now enforce page limits for researchers to publish their work. The research report contained data collected over the course of the semester and was presented according to formatting rules of Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC). The most challenging part of this assignment was figuring out how to present a large amount of information into only a few pages. Some rhetorical features you’ll notice in this piece are the use of hedging words such as may and suggests. These hedging words are important in scientific writing because the stakes in the natural sciences are quite high – meaning that is it difficult, and often rare, to prove that your research will always be correct. Additionally, you will notice that materials and methods, results, and discussion sections are follow the same series of events. Because the experiment consisted of multiple parts, it is useful to follow the same progression of experiments in each section. The parallel development in each section allows the paper to gain reproducibility, helping the reader follow the experiment clearly.
On the other hand, my portfolio also features writing from non-science classes (incase you were worried). Assignments from English, Creative Writing, and Journalism can also be found in my portfolio. These pieces demonstrate my ability to write in the humanities under a variety of genres: assignments such as research papers, text analyses, reviews, and short stories are all represented in the portfolio. Each of these genres utilize a different voice so that I may best appeal to the appropriate audience. My ability to adapt different voices can be seen in my two short stories. In my short stories I had to adapt a voice (literally) of a character that my audience would buy – however each of my short stories are written to different audiences. I would say that Autumn Under the Trees is written towards any individual who is looking for a quick, easy, whimsical read, whereas Black Friday is geared more towards young adults looking for mystery and suspense. These voices vary from my academic voice, in which I tend to assert myself as an intellect by following discipline and genre specific trends.
My hope is that the pieces I have included in my portfolio will reflect the genre awareness I have gained throughout my time at Wake Forest. A quote from the research of Berkenkotter and Huckin states “genre knowledge is therefore best conceptualized as a form of situated cognition embedded in disciplinary activities. […] a writer must understand the directions in which a field is developing and possess rhetorical savvy necessary for positioning their work within it.” This quote reflects one of the main takeaways I have learned as an Interdisciplinary Writing student. Being aware of the knowledge that underlies and is required of each genre and discipline is a major step of producing a successful text. The writing minor has helped me hone the ability to point out and name rhetorical moves when I see them, and also to understand the work that each rhetorical move does in a text. This knowledge has helped me create texts that fit genre standards by utilizing appropriate rhetorical moves in order to fulfil goal of the genre.
Another principle I have learned through the Interdisciplinary Writing minor is that good writing varies across disciplines and genres. In other words, there is no set standard that constitutes good writing. As I previously mentioned, understanding the goals of each genre and discipline, combined with the rhetorical knowledge of how to achieve those goals, is what leads to “good” or successful writing. This knowledge relates to Thaiss and Zawacki’s theories on writing development in disciplines. The writers present three stages of student writing development based on their research:
- The student generalizes disciplinary writing from a limited amount of experience in coursework.
- The student perceives inconsistencies between courses and professors. (i.e. “They all want different things.”)
- The student uses a variety of coursework to create a complex sense of the structure of the discipline.
The third stage of writing development, Thaiss and Zawacki note, is not always reached by undergraduates during their collegiate careers. However, I feel as though the Interdisciplinary Writing minor has helped me reach this stage in my development. Being a science-minded individual, I like to see data before I utilize information. A few of my writing classes have presented me with the opportunity to learn about corpus linguistics. This linguistic research tool analyzes a large collection of language, or corpora, in both written and spoken contexts – and can be used to discern patterns of language use across disciplines. My introductory writing class introduced me to corpus linguistics almost immediately. I found this one of the most useful tools for learning writing standards across disciplines as I was able to see data for rhetorical strategy use in different areas of academia. One thing about me – I have always been able to be coached. Once I could recognize the purpose of rhetorical moves in different disciplines, I began to incorporate them into my own writing. Therefore, I consider corpus linguistic research to be a helpful tool in my own writing development, and a large part of creating my own understanding of the structures of different disciplines. While I do consider myself to be in the third stage of writing development, as posed by Thaiss and Zawacki, I also consider myself to still be learning. I recognize that I learn more about myself as a writer and the writing process each time I finish an assignment.
I think a huge benefit of the Interdisciplinary Writing minor is discovering what your strengths and weaknesses are as a writer. When I am able to recognize a strength, I try to incorporate more of those rhetorical moves into my writing. When I am able to recognize a weakness as a writer, I try to be more conscious of improving those weaknesses as I write. On reflection of my own writing in both Biology and Writing, I find that my strengths tend to include leaving room for uncertainty by using hedges and boosters and using cohesive ties to create texts that are coherent. Some things I am still working on improving are choosing accurate words as well as being concise. Some of the biggest challenges for me throughout my college career have been assignments that limit my writing to one or two pages. These assignments have led me to face my weaknesses head-on and helped me become a more flexible writer.
I have also learned that I am a writer who tends to be straightforward and academic in my approach to writing. Most of my papers include guiding phrases that let the reader know where I am planning on going next in my paper. For example, in my English essay about Mrs. Dalloway, I start one paragraph by saying “The first scene I will analyze is the introduction of Sally Seton.” After which, I do exactly that and nothing more. I believe this is a strong part of my writing because I clearly state my intentions to the reader and am to the point without adding any unnecessary or confusing details. My arguments are backed up with thorough research, which I present in objective or scholarly tones, which has helped me establish credibility throughout my work.
Presenting myself as a credible writer is something I value in all of my texts, and something I hope to continue improving in my future work. As an aspiring doctor, I understand that credibility and writing in a clear and precise manner are crucial to being successful in the medical field. Ultimately, as I move forward in my writing development, I will utilize the skills I have learned during my time as a Writing minor to help establish the ethos necessary for a successful medical career.
When I chose Wake Forest as my home four years ago, I knew that I would gain the scientific knowledge I needed to become an informed doctor. What I learned very quickly though was that Wake Forest would help me develop the skills I needed to share what I have learned. Writing in the sciences (and other disciplines) requires contributions of knowledge or ideas in order to facilitate learning among the community. The reader engagement strategies I have developed through the Writing minor have helped me learn to join the conversation and create writer-reader relationships throughout my texts. The dialogue every writer joins is one that I have learned is continuous. While my time as a student writer is coming to an end, I look forward to joining new academic discourse as I continue writing in the medical field. In all honestly, my high school self would not be excited to know that I had a lifetime of writing ahead of me. My twenty-two year old self now understands that writing is pervasive and necessary across all areas of academics - which I feel is reflected in the different categories of this portfolio.