Richard Dalm's Portfolio

Richard Dalm

September 19, 2016

Professional Writing

Reflection

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Before beginning this class, I thought this class was going to be a massive writing class. A class that would make a student write twenty pages of content about a subject not all that interesting. However, that was not the case. I was pleased to see that my expectations for the class were shattered. Instead of writing content about subjects, we were writing, designing, and reading about how to construct our portfolio on an online website. The classwork was focused on building ourselves virtually and how we as people are going to present ourselves in the future. After reading some material about designing and writing for the creation of portfolio building, we apply that knowledge we learned by designing our own unique portfolios. Designing the portfolio was the enjoyable aspect of the class because I got to creatively write material that interests me and begin to show others my passion.

My knowledge of digital portfolios was expanded because of the reading.  From the first week, to the third week, my knowledge grew about how to first describe myself professionally and then showcase what I can do. However, when I applied my knowledge towards creating my portfolio, little did I know that I had an established understanding of this subject. When the instructor and my fellow peers reviewed my work, there was not much to improve on because all the content I applied was fantastic through each assignment. I will not say I had a complete understanding of how to create a digital portfolio at the start of this class. But perhaps I honed my ability to completely understand how to create a digital portfolio instead.

Changing the format from a written essay to multimedia for an online audience is difficult. For an audience that reviews an essay, the content of the essay needs to be well- researched and interesting to read. However, for a multimedia audience, the content that you write needs to accurate, interesting throughout, and visually appealing. I struggled at first making the transformation from essay and multimedia formats. When writing in multimedia format, I will remember to be as visually appealing as I can be to my audience.

My digital portfolio shows clear understanding of the course material. I made sure to keep the portfolio as simple as possible and to have viewers follow a path. The path leads them from my home page to my current classwork, blog, résumé, and finally who I am. Each of my portfolio pieces, as well as my proposal and cover letter, are well-written because I wanted to showcase my writing ability and am proud of the course work. I believe that a well-designed, easy to use website used for my portfolio is essential to showcase my skills and abilities.

The discussion post that was most helpful was the blog post. I have never formally written a blog post. The perspective of this assignment helped me understand how to create written content for many viewers to see. In fact, one of the aspects that I learned from the blog post was to present a piece of writing that was clear, informative, and short. I also learned to select and connect visuals to the writing. Those aspects can be quite difficult to achieve in any writing.

One of the aspects that I was hoping to learn from this class was the ability to search for jobs that interest me and write different cover letters for each one. When you are job searching, you may need more than one cover letter for different jobs. By writing different cover letters for different employers, you can have different perspectives of how to present yourself accordingly to a different job position. After having different cover letters made, your writing ability could strengthen and you can better prepare yourself for actually finding a job.

The advice I would give to future students of this class is to write genuine, honest, and straight reviews for your peers. When you are presenting yourself in front of your employers, you are making your work look strong. The same process of your review to your peers should also be applied; do not make your peer reviews weak. If the review you give is well thought and informative, people take notice of your time of reviewing their work. This earns you recognition among your class and instructor.