ENC 2135 Project 4 Portfolio

Hello! I am a freshman majoring in Religion here at FSU. This semester in ENC, I began with an examination of discourse on Balinese Gamelan, specifically Belaganjur, for project one. While I was still interested in this subject, it was not as compatible with projects two and three. I then shifted my work toward a perceived relationship between traditional religious elements and data structures. I've been especially interested in work in this field recently, probably largely due to me liking computers from an early age and being interested in religions.

I've enjoyed contributing to this area of research and hope to do more work in it in the future.

I came into ENC 2135 with a base understanding of how to cater a message to an audience using different genres and rhetorical strategies, but throughout the class this skill was really developed in a noticeable way. This semester has been very writing intensive for me, so some of the skills that I picked up in this class were helpful in tackling tasks outside of this class alone. Although perhaps more difficult than it could have otherwise been, each of my three major projects were honed at an entirely different audience. My project one, on Balinese belaganjur and its social intricacies, was purposed to serve a musicological academic audience. For project two, when I shifted to ties between religion and data structures, my audience was a more general academic one, as a literature review is most likely to be engaged with by an audience of this sort. Finally, for project three, fairly niche but intersectional audiences were focused on by each of my three genres. All three of these genres focused on some kind of cultural curator, though. I am most proud of my genre creation in project three.

Learning more about how to shift my tone and rhetorical strategy for different kinds of audiences was helpful for being able to spread my message differently within different contexts. I often find that my vocabulary choices or rhetorical choices in general can come off as emotionally charged, and that this isn’t always the best for academic papers. While writing for this class and the different pretend audiences that I chose, I learned how to better phrase myself in order to more effectively reach my audience and accurately portray my arguments. I think that I somewhat structured understanding of audience and applicable genres has been helpful for me, as I sometimes struggle to adhere to genre conventions when there aren’t laid out boundaries. ENC 2135 has helped me to better understand these boundaries and when they apply. Also, I feel as if just the general practice with writing has been helpful to my capability as a writer. These are learned skills that I will take out of this class.

Although not a direct objective of the course, my composition using HTML and CSS (and some Java Script implementation for the cat cursor!) improved throughout project 3 and now, project 4. I have enjoyed putting my work in this kind of format, and I hope to make an unrelated personal website at some point in the future. Finding creative ways to implement the requirements of the course into this sort of format has sometimes been challenging but has overall been worthwhile. I think that this genre is intriguing for various audiences, but especially the audiences that I am personally interested in. I also think that it can serve as an interesting means of interconnecting several different genres; for example, in this webpage there are linked several PDFs, images, and bodies of text. This part of project 3 as well as project 4 have been my favorite genre to create in this class.