E-Portfolio William Shih

Dear Michele,

In the process of taking UWP 1Y, I have learned so much about writing thanks to your

class and the things that you taught. In order to demonstrate my writing, I decided to choose the

Wikipedia Entry and Podcast Project into the portfolio, deciding to exclude the Living Picture

Narrative. The main reason why I chose these two was because I was able to talk about specific,

detailed, and narrow research in the Wikipedia article and podcast. These two assignments

provided me with a subject that I wanted to talk about and I believed that the Living Picture

Narrative was not as interesting or important to most audiences. When writing, I like to include

as much quantitative analysis as possible and many pieces of statistics, which fits in well with

the requirements of the Wikipedia Entry and Podcast Project. The Living Picture Narrative does

not fit as well into this, so I decided to include the Wikipedia Entry over the Living Picture

Narrative. I am glad that I took this class, because I wrote about some of the things that like to

write about in this class, learning so much as writing and revising in the process.

The Wikipedia Entry demonstrates my ability to analyze and summarize a complex

subject from journal articles in a way that may be more accessible and readable for those

unfamiliar or those that need an introduction to the topic. Due to the nature of the Wikipedia

article, it consists of mostly summaries and relatively short explanations for the topic, while

being as neutral as possible. I am not supposed to add any original research or provide a thesis

when writing an article of this kind, which is good, because I definitely do not understand the

concept well enough to make such an argument anyways. This assignment involved the highest

and most difficult level reading that I have ever done in a school assignment, which involved

some graduate level math and economics, so it stretched what I would normally do in a school
related assignment. I designed the article based on what a real Wikipedia article looked like,

although I did not make my own images and graphs because I dont have the raw dataset

immediately available to do so, so I borrowed graphs from the original author of the

corresponding study that did have all of the data.

The Podcast Project involved my ability to write in a different way that I have never done

before. Also, I had trouble coming up with what to do with what I wanted to talk about, but in

the end, I decided to talk about something related to economics again, same as all the other

previous assignments. With the Podcast Project, I was talking directly to the audience and it was

more informal than the Wikipedia Entry. Since this is both spoken and written, I had to write in a

way that would be well understood in either format. Varying writing styles to fit the audience is

an important skill, because there will inevitably be many audiences depending on the project

when writing something in the future. I did this project in Fremont, CA, near my home, because

it was most convenient to do so and it adequately supported my ideas about what was going on

regarding the topic that I chose.

Two very important course learning objectives out of the five that is most relevant to the

assignments that I included in the portfolio are the rhetorical knowledge and research. The

rhetorical knowledge involves writing for different audiences when it is appropriate to do so and

also all of the editing and revising that we did in this class. Wikipedia article and the podcast had

clearly different audiences, different topic, and different objective that would result in a different

writing style. The peer review process was also involved in this class, revising others and my

own articles multiple times and learning how to more effectively revise and edit after doing so.

The research part was very important, partially because I tried to make it more intensive with a

higher than normal difficulty topic. I used difficult pieces of research from high level economists
that require some time to process and summarize. I also had to integrate and cite these sources

into my article. Even though there was no primary research involved in the Wikipedia entry,

there was definitely some of my own thoughts and analysis involved in the podcast project,

which is involved more with the audience.

Overall, there was a lot that I learned from your class. The reflections helped me

remember the class goals that I learned and what class goals that I ended up focusing on. The

feedback that you gave also helped me improve my writing so thanks for that too.

Sincerely,

William Shih