The Making of an E-Portfolio Part 3

So . . .  I changed my mind.

I’ve been doing that a lot lately. I don’t know if it’s a sign of waffling on my ideas or finally figuring things out, but whatever the reason, good or bad, my mind is changed. That’s a weird expression now that I think about it. Has my mind changed? Or just my thoughts. Considering that a mind is a thought making machine, does  a mind have to change in order to produce different thoughts? I digress.

The point being that this will not be a grad school portfolio. I want to have fun. I wrote an about me that is just zany enough for me to like it. Now, I have written my intro, which has some of that zany (an opium reference of all things). Now that I think about it “zany” is one of those words only used by zany people. Now that what I intend to create has shifted. It’s time to think about my audience.  Writers like me? Is it claustrophic/narcissitic to write mostly to yourself and people like you? Isn’t that who writers usually write to whether they mean to our not?

The thing about changing your mind is that you can’t predict it. I was struggling with what theme I wanted to do until I randomly did a google search for free to use black and white pictures with the tagline of Japan. I saw the tree image. Got inspired to put it in the background. The phrase “a strong core with many branches” came into my brain and BAM! I had a theme. Admittedly, changing your mind once makes you feel uncertain about it. And I am concerned that my theme is overdone and cliche. But  for now, I’m happy with it.

I also changed Essay 2: Re-mediating an Argument. I was merciless. 2,000 words complex ideas, even a Buddhist saying. Cut it down to 1000. Removed all quotes. Cut out so much of my research. Added pictures. Even a graph.  I feel like I lobotomized my paper. But I made it into  a CNN opinion article. I now have a very low opinion of CNN- I read most of their articles and they are rather  . . . shallow.

I also tried to rewrite Essay 4 because a very ironic fact. I wrote about how writing digital media helped me expand my writing structure and tone. But I wrote about it in a a pretty traditional academic way. So I tried rewriting it and I’m not sure if I got the effect I wanted.  It is less formal. I think.

Now I am back to the grindstone to write the intros for each page section and then figure out how I’m going to incorporate each of my essays. I don’t want to make a webpage. Because I am going to be adding multiple essays to a page and that would just be tiresome. But I don’t want to make download necessary and I don’t just want to make a text link. The solution I thought of was using images but that doesn’t seem practical. It seems like I end every single one of these posts, planning to sleep on a problem.

That should have been the theme for my e-portfolio. The necessity of sleep.

By Julia

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