I to have given thought to what I would like to do with my portfolio when the class is over. At first I thought I would just delete the site and move on. Now that I have gone through the reading and listened to Professor Jones, I am thinking about keeping my site up at least through my law school application process. When it comes to applying to law schools, it is all about advertising yourself and having my own website would be a unique way to do that. It would take a good bit of document revision as well as site revision, and new pages must be added. However, as an English major, it should be a habit to revise everything that you do anyway.

The chapter also focused on reshaping our documents so that their purposes are geared towards our target audience. We have to take in consideration that there could be other people looking at our portfolios other than our classmates and Professor Jones. Since I definitely want to use this portfolio for future endeavors, I definitely want it to be something I can use to get myself a job. Now obviously I will have to keep my portfolio up to date and revise it as I continue to do new projects and progress further in my career, but this whole concept of  gearing our portfolios towards an audience is crucial because we need our portfolios to connect with our target audience.

Content is clearly an important aspect we have to consider when we are doing revisions for our portfolios. What we include or get rid of can make all of the difference. We have to consider everything we are including in our portfolios and their purpose. Since most of my internship involved social media, it wouldn’t make sense for me to include a newsletter that I took no part of. The items we include have to show what we have learned and assess our writing skills and our progress over the semester. It’s going to be hard to decide what to include or what to leave out of our portfolios but I definitely have a better idea with the direction I want to go after reading this chapter and our discussion in class on Thursday. I want my portfolio to illustrate the work I’ve done so far but I also want it to show that I have a personality that would benefit any company I work for. Like the book said, “You want to be seen as professional and knowledgeable” (PTPC 66).

Since I’m working with an international audience, I’m thinking that’s what I need to focus on. Maybe focus on the audience and not so much on each individual project. I guess this is where my theme would come in as well. After finishing the reading it’s still hard for me to say what I want my theme to be, but I think focusing on who my audience is will be a decent start. Writing for an international audience has been interesting because I can’t say things that I normally would in my writing – people from other countries may not understand certain references that are being made because they aren’t familiar with our culture.

But anyway, I feel like I still have a lot to think about with the portfolio. I think it’s going to be more difficult than the poster, but I’m looking forward to it more for some reason.

I have started to put things together with my portfolio. There are a number of documents I want to include in the portfolio, some of the being the interviews I have done for the Alumni Spotlight. The section titled “Artifacts and contents of your portfolio” (PTPC 32) really helped me go through my documents and narrow it down to the ones I could deem worthy for use in my portfolio. Since social media was such an enormous aspect of my internship I was wondering if I should focus on that. The drawbacks from this are that I’m already focusing on social media for the poster and it would leave out a tremendous amount of the other work I’ve done for the Association.

I need help with a theme. Any ideas you guys might have would be fantastic. Right now I’m thinking I want my portfolio to show how much I’ve had to adjust and adapt my writing to meet the needs my internship is asking of me.

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by  astrittm.

What I wanted to show with my portfolio was how much a professional and technical writer can contribute to a law firm. In order to do this, I want to show a wide range of projects that required many different types of writing. I agree that structure is important and one of the hardest things I think I’ll encounter in my portfolio is how to show so many different things and still make it easily navigable. I’ve played around with a few ideas on how to set up my portfolio and I’ll let the class know when we have our portfolio peer review class.

After reading through the WordPress book, I started looking at different themes for my blog site to make it more portfolio-esque. That’s another thing I plan on doing this weekend.

Looking forward to our poster workshop tomorrow! I’ll be that girl with the sketch on a napkin. (Harry Potter started on a napkin, though. Encouragement!)

So, we want our web portfolios to be as easy to understand and navigate as possible, all while being attractive and representative of our “portfolio identities.”   We will assume by the point where we are designing the portfolio that we have already selected our “artifacts” and have pretty well established our portfolio identities. How to we present it? In Portfolios for Technical and Professional Communication, chapter 3 discusses selecting your artifacts and then finding a metaphor.  This book describes it as “a way of creating consistency and a sense of individuality”(pg 35).  Have you guys thought about a possible  metaphor to represent your portfolio? Have you considered an overall theme? I feel that a theme should be  clean and professional, while still unique. What is appropriate for our web portfolios? Perhaps a web portfolio that has a car theme, where you spin the steering wheel to access the table of contents maybe isn’t appropriate for a capstone course web portfolio.

The book separates themes/metaphors into different categories: Professional Personality, Personal Interest, Conceptual, and Symbol. When considering your audience, which would seem the most appropriate for your web portfolio? I have had a great emphasis in advertising and marketing in my internship, should I set up a cute billboard as a table of contents? I also really enjoy Buffy the Vampire Slayer, does that mean I should have a blonde girl vanquishing vampires as a theme for conquering my internship? It all depends on how I want my audience to understand my portfolio and my identity. How has your internship affected your writing identity, and how to you want it to be presented?

To answer that for myself, I have really gained a greater understand of rhetoric, and have a better understanding of design and advertising. Fortunately, I have had a decent amount of training in some adobe programs, and design and information architecture have actually been very big staples of my internship. I feel that as these are my strengths, perhaps I can find a subtle way to make that into a theme. Can you guys find a subtle way to make a theme out of your portfolio identities?

Lastly, I think that the structure is very important to discuss. This thing needs to be easy to navigate and have some sort of organization. Have you thought about how it will be organized? The book goes over categorizing your artifacts. My artifacts will probably be organized similarly to my poster, because I want consistency in my overall appearance and identity for the course. This was way longer than expected. I hope you guys are progressing well with your work, and if you want any assistance with Adobe Indesign, I would have no problem meeting up and helping you out. Happy Discussion!

The part about establishing a professional identity from the readings really stuck out to me. The past few weeks, I’ve really brainstorming a lot to try and figure out  what I want to do with my portfolio. Portfolios for Technical and Professional Communicators says, “It gives you the opportunity to control the professional integrity you want to create for yourself in light of your needs, skills. and personal expectations” in regards to creating a portfolio (19). This portfolio will allow me to present myself in a way a resume can’t. It will expand on the goals I want to achieve and the path I want to take. It will specifically describe what I have done, what I will do, and what I want to do. This chapter really helped me hone in on the identity of my portfolio and gave me better direction as to where I want to go with it.

Usually when I make portfolios I just pick things that I had A’s on, and what went best with the guidelines for the portfolio. However this time , I am going to try to make my portfolio an excellent representation of my internship, and make it functional for use after I graduate.  I really want to exhibit that I have utilized so many PWE skills, as well as skills I have learned in my advertising classes. I personally love portfolio classes. I would much rather throw together a huge portfolio and have a chance to perfect my work, than take a huge exam.   I want my portfolio to show how my work will probably always be…a mixture of utility and creativity.