ENGL 117
Fall 2019
Welcome to my portfolio! This is the culmination of a semester of projects, reflections, and products created in English 117: Arguing on the Internet. It highlights the final pieces I've made as well as the skills I developed, obstacles I faced and how they were overcome.
Throughout this course, I had to do a fair amount of problem solving. I was not well versed in Adobe Photoshop or Audacity and found that many of the technical skills involved were not extremely intuitive. I am familiar with Adobe Illustrator and have had practice processing audio in the past, but the platforms used were very different from my experiences. Even just navigating around the platforms was a challenge at first. Once I began to spend more time with these projects, my technical skills increased drastically and I was able to work with the programs much more efficiently I feel more confident with illustrator and many of the tools we used for these assignments. I also feel as though my ability to edit audio and really know what to hone in on for different styles of audio projects has improved. Most of this was found through trial and error, but I believe that it was a good way to learn how to use these tools.
More than anything, my communication skills have developed considerably over the course of this semester. This is especially due to the podcast and audio essay assignments. It is so important to be able to communicate ideas in a clear and concise way. I found that with these two assignments in particular, I had a challenging time doing so. When recording the podcast, you aren't really sure what the other people in the group are going to say or what direction they are going to take. As a result, you have to be able to think quickly and focus on the flow of conversation as well as making the point you are going to bring to the table clear. With the audio essay, speaking for five minutes or so with no visual aid is a challenge. I had to adapt and be able to keep the audio interesting.
Being able to reflect on the projects throughout this course has been very helpful for making improvements and bettering my work. Reading over the comments from Professor Anderson on my work allowed me to focus on weak areas that I may have not even spotted at first. I found that after reflection and editing, I was much more proud of what I had created. I also am very happy with the reflections in my portfolio and how they contribute to the exhibition of the knowledge I gained from this class. Presenting both original projects and the revised, cleaner projects creates a fuller portfolio that better emulates the takeaways from the course. Without seeing both sides, it is not as evident how much work went into these projects.
Portfolio Video
Audio Essays
Audio Essay Rough Draft
Revised Audio Essay
I thoroughly enjoyed working on these audio arguments. As I was working on these, I did not go off of the script that I wrote exactly. At points, the sentences flowed better out loud if they were adjusted slightly. This is something I wish I had taken into consideration when I was writing the script. I thought about all of the tips that I had learned about making sentences shorter, using contractions, structuring sentences to include the subject in the beginning, and so much more. However, reading the words out loud after writing them would have been beneficial. Instead, I just went off the script in some places. There are so many different tools that are available to manipulate audio with audacity and I spent a lot of time playing around with them. I believe the two most important ones that I took into consideration was the tool that fades the audio out and the tool that changes the volume. Evening out the volume and fading in and out of clips made the transitions much better and the sound was very put together. Ideas were more clear as well once the audio was more uniform, making the argument itself stronger.
Podcast
Edited Podcast
In all honesty, this was probably my least favorite project because of how disappointed I was in my own dialogue. I found that I kept repeating the same words in between my main ideas due to slight nerves and my arguments were not as strong as I had planned them out to be. Overall, the podcast sounded fluid since there were several people talking. It is difficult to practice or prepare for projects like this without just gaining experience to get better. In post production, I went in and made everyone's clips more even and cut out as much background noise as I could. I also adjusted the intro and outro music to have better transition. I believed that it was too long originally, so I cut some of it out and faded it in and out of the speaking. This product as a whole, I believe is impressive; however, I do wish I could go back and rerecord my dialogue.
Audio Arguments Reflection
How do audio arguments compare across audio essays and podcasts?
There are many difference between the audio essays and the podcasts. One of the most obvious differences in the conversational aspect of podcasts. The podcasts were more fluid than the audio essays because there was back and forth as everyone contributed their own perspective. The audio essays were very structured. Since they had a script, it was clear that they were being presented in a more formal way than the podcasts. Additionally, it seemed as though clips and extra sounds were more beneficial to the audio essays. When only one person is speaking, it helps to have a break and bring in different sonics to keep the listener interested. With the podcasts, having many people speak allowed for that effect without outside clips.
Memes
The memes were one of the most fun projects to work on. Manipulating photoshop was a challenge but I believe that after gaining a basic understanding of some of the tools and gestures for navigations, I would feel much more comfortable using it in other classes. The tutorials on the website for Photoshop as well as Professor Anderson's tutorials helped a lot. Coming up with funny ideas that weren't wordy was the most difficult part of this project. After fleshing many ideas out, I am proud of the final products I made.
The image to the right was one of my original memes that I ended up replacing. It was made with very low effort and creativity. Though it used the meme template as it was supposed to, it was just not very funny. I was not proud of this work and I wanted to create something a little better.
This meme to the left I one made by Jeff that I really liked. It blended together two images and didn't follow a template but was still very funny. After seeing this, I decided to make the meme about drinking from the Old Well. It gave me more creative freedom so I made two mirrored images and then blended another image of water onto one of them. I was much more satisfied with this meme and I believe it was more effective and relatable than the other.
App Argument
Original App Prototype
Revised App Prototype
Adobe XD is the only platform that I had used previously to this class. I made a prototype for an app that I coded for a computer science class last year. Regardless, I find this platform to be very intuitive and easy to navigate. Therefore, I spent more time focusing on my argument. As mentioned in my portfolio video, my most difficult obstacle was making the app argument more implicit. After rearranging the layout and adding in notifications, this was achieved much better than it was in the original app. I am proud of this result and think that my point is very well expressed now.
GIFs
This project took more work and effort for me than any of the other projects this semester. I had a very difficult time at first getting all of the layers set to be shown at the correct time in Photoshop. For some reason, I kept accidentally deleting layers, moving them behind other layers when they should have been visible, and moving text around within layers. I had to play around with the platform a ton before I had a solid start to each GIF. I put a lot of effort into these and, for the first GIF, revised the text to be more legible and timed correctly. Regardless, I am not entirely proud of these. I wish that my skills were more developed but that comes with time. I would love to revisit this practice of making GIFs in Photoshop in the future because, although the process is frustrating, they are fun to make and give a lot of creative freedom. It would be interesting to look into making a stop motion animation frame by frame for a GIF format. Instead of scraping a video animation from the internet and adding an idea to it, starting from scratch would allow me to start with the idea and develop it on my own terms in a creative way.
Twitter Reports
Twitter Coding
Original Twitter Report
Revised Twitter Report
These Twitter reports were the most traditional styled arguments. They were in essay form and were based on data and statistics, which is a style that I love writing in. Analysis papers and very intriguing to me and being able to be very hands on with the collection of my data was rewarding. After getting the corpus of Tweets with my hashtag, I was fully in charge of categorizing them and the direction I took them in was completely under my jurisdiction. In my original draft, there were some typos and clarity issues that were point out by Professor Anderson. These were very helpful because I do not always catch mistakes like that, especially considering the ideas I expressed are already clear to myself. After revisions, I was much more confident with my analysis and the strength of the argument overall. The structure was improved and focused and it led to the conclusion much smoother.
I learned a lot about different methods for arguing across different medias in this class. The media of the project you are woking on is very important to consider when you are trying to convey a certain message. It is crucial that the idea being presented is adapted to the type of media, and not the other way around. For example, with the audio essays, listeners are better able to grasp ideas if they are presented in shorter, quicker points. Whereas, if you are writing a paper, thoughts tend to be longer and more extensive within a single sentence. The memes also worked in the same way. The more effective memes had less words and let the combination of image and text hold the power. Creating projects that are tailored to the type of media being used is vital to making effective arguments.