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James Yu
Professor Greg McClure
Writing 39B
2015.12.09
Portfolio Introduction
In writing 39B, we are required to meet the objectives of understanding the concept of
rhetoric and rhetorical situations, and analyze them exclusively. To reach the goal, we need to
study the texts closely and explain the elements within the rhetorical situation. We are also
required to reflect our own improvements upon completing the major assignments. In this
showcase of my final portfolio I will be illustrating what I have learned throughout the tenweek course. As a writer, my strength is to value each piece of information carefully and use
them correctly to enhance my claims. On the other hand, one of my weaknesses is that I
generalize my statements too often instead of delivering specific descriptions.
The first link I provided is dedicated to our first major assignment, Rhetorical
Analysis. The objective of this paper is to closely study the assigned book, I Am Legend, and
analyze how does the author set up the rhetorical situation in order to convey his point in the
novel. In this page, I uploaded the first and the final draft of RA papers just to provide the
difference between the revised work and the initial work. Later, I provided a brief
introduction to this assignment and the curation of the process, in which I picked two places
that I revised in this assignment. I also posted other related works including the prewriting
and exploration and peer review. The prewriting exercise gave us a glance of the major
assignment; it basically was a short version of the RA assignment. The peer review had
mentioned several points that I could improve on; most of them were warning that there were
too many general statement.

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This assignment, as a turning point, helps me realize my own weaknesses and
improves me to become a better writer. My greatest strength of the work is that my
supporting evidences have successfully strengthened the claims I made in each paragraph.
Specifically, the reviewer commented that the evidences in body paragraphs do perform a
good job of staying on topic.
On the other hand, one of my weaknesses in this assignment is that my arguments were too
broad and hard to define within the required length. Since I have made many general
statements in the first draft of RA, I basically rewrote the whole essay in the revision in order
to analyze the story directly and specifically. After all, I had written a reflection essay on the
performance I did for this assignment. The lesson that I learned from this assignment is very
crucial, which is to write directly and specifically.
The next page belongs to the RIP project essay, where I include all the writings I have
done that are related to this project. For this project we have to demonstrate our
understanding in the materials about the rhetoric and present it in the form of essay,
presentation, or short film. Our group decided to do a short film called No More, and the
link can be found in the home page as well as in the RIP essay page. Similar to the format in
RA essay page, I uploaded the first draft and final draft of the RIP reflection essays,
indicating the improvement from one to the next. I briefly introduced the purpose of doing
this project and then followed up with few revision points that helped strengthen my
reflection essay. I have also included the project plan that we wrote before we started filming,
the peer review that I received from my partner, and the reflection essay of both the other
class and our class. Though the peer review was not as helpful as the one in RA assignment
since I was doing better in this RIP project, it did bring up some points that I could use to
improve my wording and details. It is mentioned in my revision part of RIP essay that I have
used his suggestion to relate our protagonists life to the college students in real life.

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As a developing writer, my strength in doing this assignment is to specifically reflect
my own work. That is, I have overcome my weakness observed in the RA paper and
improved in my reflection paper by analyzing my own work in details. Despite the fact that
the focus of reflection essay was different from the focus of rhetorical analysis, I was able to
clearly convey my points by going in depth of my writing and was not afraid to be specific.
The weakness that I need to tackle on right now is my grammar skill. This part could take
time to improve because I am used to the English grammar rule. However, what I could do
was to look for help from friends or schools writing center to avoid grammatical error in my
essay. The RA paper we learned the importance of expectations in horror genre that are used
in the given rhetorical situation in order to achieve certain reception, and we have applied the
expectations to set up our rhetorical situation too in this project in order to communicate with
our targeted audiences.
In the Selection link there are four chosen works that were done in the first three
weeks. I have made a short commentary on each of them, explaining the importance of them
appearing in my final portfolio. I see them as the breakdown practice of the RA paper. In
these works my major weakness was not obvious because I was simply responding to the
questions in the prompt, but they do indeed present a moment when I learned something in
this course. For example, I learned the importance of the peer review process in the
Reznor/Cash response; I learned how to analyze the horror genre expectations in the story
Snow, Glass, Apples; The presentation marked the first time we analyzed the paragraph in I
Am Legend.
I also create a blog page where I posted weekly responses from week one to week
four. Basically I was reflecting my own working process on weekly basis; the responses here
can also serve as the practice to the reflection essays that we had to do for the major
assignments. I evaluated myself honestly and directly pointed to my struggles and challenges

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of the week. Besides that, the last link is the slides of the two presentations we did in class.
The Apocalyptic Horror Genre is the presentation of Monster as Genres that we did in
week three, and it is also the first group assignment we had to present in front of the class.
The presentation of Horror Tropes is just a preview of the tropes that we were going to
address in our RIP project. Although there were other presentations, the two-sentence horror
story and the paragraph analysis, we did not create a PowerPoint slides since they mainly
focused on the content itself rather than the visuals.
As a writer, I have grown a lot throughout the quarter thanks to the help from both the
professor and my classmates. Having a conference with the professor was indeed helpful; I
could quickly find out my own mistakes when going over my paper with the professor, and
he would also point out my strengths and cheer me up when I was struggling. My group
mates particularly provided great supports too. We would communicate through texts and
meet up if needed in order to help each other in class. Also, the peer reviews were very
helpful; the comments they made were cruel, yet pointed directly to my weakness. A lot of
revisions I did were based on the peer review that I received from my classmates. Finally,
please enjoy my final portfolio!