The Making of an E-portfolio Part 4

I’ve been neglectful. I admit. I’m never one to keep up things. Journals. Diets. Exercise routines.

But I feel like I have a legitimate excuse. At least it’s legitimate to me.

Since I last wrote, I was wrapped up in so many projects for the e-portfolio. My intros. My citations. My re-mediation. Essay 4.

Then, I was too busy to write.

Now, besides focusing on my other finals, I’ve been too . . .  uninspired. Most of what I’ve been doing is linking, citing, and making sure the site works the way I want it to.  These are activities I don’t have much to say about. Maybe because they’re boring. Maybe because they take up so much time. Maybe because I’ve had to be methodical, checking every link and source.

These all influence it but I think the reason I haven’t enjoyed this stage as much is that I feel like it’s a distraction. It’s necessary but what am I learning about writing from doing it? I know the rhetoric of embracing form. That presentation and medium matter to writing. They’re the package. Still, it was tedious with my podcast, messing with the volume settings, and it’s getting tedious now, having to link everything. I recognize it as a good way to link your readers to further resources and establish cred but . . .  I have no passion for it. You can never link enough. Never have enough resources. It’s tiring though that might just be the final’s fatigue talking.

Sometimes, rebel that I am, I made the deliberate choice not to do links. The problem with breaking convention, is whether or not you have the cred to show you’re doing it intentionally. Otherwise, you’re thought of as lazy and incompetent. But I do have good reasons for why I did not put links in certain essays.

  •  One, linking can be distracting and I may not want you to leave the page before finishing the essay.
  •  Two, some of these pieces, I’m thinking my Asian Studies Essay and my Museums Studies Essay (my god it was tedious just doing those- a total of 10 clicks) in particular are academic essays. Why would I give them links? Academic essays traditionally don’t have them, judging from my experience with all the numerous ones I’ve had to read. I did put links in their works cited/bibliography that’s why I repeat it so much.
  • Lastly, I want to represent the drafts I finished and turned in and those drafts, often times meant for print, did not have links.

Just by putting something online you’re re-purposing it because reading something on paper and reading something online are different experiences with different expectations.

One, paragraphs with the classic indent are hard to read.  That’s why I get rid of it and separate using spaces. Why does this matter? Not as much by itself but if you think about the fact that posts tend not to have pages, it does matter. The paragraph, without pages, separated from each other, becomes the main unit. It’s a snappier unit than the page. They’re shorter and more of them, which is why I think we also have less tolerance for long pieces on the internet. We only have short units to work with. 8 paragraphs to go, rather than 3 or 4 pages. Plus, I don’t know if I’m the only one but when I have the pages in my hand and can put it a finished page in the “done” pile it gives me a sense of achievement I don’t get endlessly scrolling downward. Moreover, there is the tendency to separate out important sentences into their own paragraph.

This isn’t done in academic writing but is common in digital writing.

Two, there’s an expectation when something is on the internet, when it’s on a blog especially, that it is a less formal style of writing. I don’t mean that it’s ungrammatical slang. I mean that writing tends to be less rigid and academic. (I know there’s plenty of academic stuff on the internet but they’re written for academics and for that reason, most likely retain the conventions of print form.) The exact opposite of the above essays I’ve mentioned. By putting them on a web page, though I think it’s a necessary evil that keeps them on my site and prevents annoying downloads, there’s the expectation that they won’t/shouldn’t be as dense as they are.

Thirdly, there are the distractions. I know people can be distracted reading from a book in real life. But it is worse on the internet, with 20 tabs, music or netflix in the background, facebook, etc. In order to understand a complex academic essay, you can’t read it with Scrubs in the background (belief me, I’ve tried). Moreover, you can’t fully grasp it if you keep switching between the essay and the rest of the internet.

I’m not saying that they’re aren’t people who buckle down and don’t multi-task. But studies have shown that those people are fewer and fewer in my generation. I’m not saying that there aren’t people who expect serious heavy analysis on the internet. There are. I’m not saying that there are people who don’t get lost scrolling down in sea of paragraphs and enjoy 85 tabs on their browser. I’m not even saying that putting my academic papers on web pages was a no good very bad thing.

I’m just bitching and moaning about function and form. How hard it is to make something meant for one context fit into another, even if it seems to be a simple transition from print to digital. Choices have to be made. I made the choice not to maintain the professional, formal MLA style because it’d be arduous to read on the screen and difficult to format for wordpress. At the same time, it bothered me putting it into the different style because when I see it I don’t think “academic essay.”

I think I’m getting to that point. Where I either go over everything again with a fine-toothed comb and change everything. Make raps for all my academic essays. Take out all my pictures so that I know for sure I’ll be save from the copyright trolls. Go over every single piece of writing in this- which not even counting the attached essays, the intros alone are quite a number of words. Heaven forbid. Change my theme. Either my wordpress theme or the theme for this porfolio both would be equally detrimental. When it feels like it’s just little stuff or huge stuff, it’s kind of disheartening. There are either small changes you won’t notice or structural problems you either won’t notice or won’t have time to fix. You wonder what you can do. Not necessarily what you should do. Plus, I’ve been living with this so long, I don’t have the perspective for “should”.

One thing I’m insecure about it whether or not people will know to click on the main button for the menu- most sites just have that as a categorical thing but each one of mine has information. I feel like there’s so much information everywhere on this site that it’s no longer instantly available, you have to go look at the huge re-mediation and re-purposing project tab, then the individual tab for each project and finally the writing itself. Does it truly need so much introduction or is it just confusing and redundant? The only way to fix it would be to destroy a lot of my work and change to a theme that has buttons that are strictly categorical and don’t lead to or represent a page- I’m not sure a theme like that exists on WordPress and would it be worth it this late into the game to search endlessly for one and then have to readapt my portfolio?

As these blogs, inevitably end. I’m going to bed. I may dream about it. I’m going to do a last minute once over tomorrow morning and submit.  Then, I will probably write my last one of these which will hopefully be triumphant.

By Julia

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s