The artifacts displayed on this website highlight my skills in a myriad of ways, from video editing, to writing about rhetorical choices in songs, to even my skills at web programming. My first artifact added to this website was the rhetorical analysis of Prequel by Falling in Reverse, which challenged my abilities to find and untangle the rhetorical choices in the piece. I used a lot of what I had learned in high school for this piece because it felt very familiar to what I had done before, and I jumped right into this project with little to no planning at all. Transitioning away from analysis and into creating rhetoric, the second major assignment was much further outside my writing comfort zone, and the second artifact shows a bit of insight to the first time I ever did formal planning for a writing assignment. Going into a research paper without a clear plan would have been a disaster, and I’m extremely glad that I had the foresight to create a plan, and execute it.

        Jumping into the first formal research paper I had ever done, I used my previous skills of programming to write the essay in LaTeX, the industry standard for professional math proofs and research papers. Although I had never used LaTeX before, I learned quickly, using the similarities it shared with other programming languages. With the research paper behind me, the final writing assignment was upon me, composing in three different genres, and sharing what I learned during the research assignment.

        Choosing the first two genres was easy, but I struggled to come up with what I should do for the final one. I ended up digging through my old google drive assignments for inspiration, and I came across a personal narrative I wrote in my junior year of high school. It stuck out to me because of how much of an oddity it was: a piece about my life and experiences. Both of these topics are things I despise writing about, but I wrote the entire essay in the span of about 40 minutes, and never edited it once afterward. I chose to include it in my website as a small insight to my old writing pieces from high school.

        Although my personal narrative didn’t help too much with finding my final genre, I did use some of the techniques I used for the narrative. Instead of overly planning it like I had with the research paper, I wrote quickly and informally, allowing my voice to shine through more than usual. I still think my skills are stronger and more developed in the academic tone, but it’s much quicker to ignore the rules and have fun with it. I also let the fun shine a bit more in my second genre: Tik Toks. The fast paced, humor driven style was a blast to write and edit. My final genre was a bit more serious, but was one of the easiest ones to do: a tutorial. From my years of being a math tutor, teaching concepts doesn’t come as a struggle anymore, and even helps me understand it better myself.

        My perspective on writing has varied throughout my years, from finding it a chore in middle school, to thinking it was only done for boring topics so that I could graduate, to finally having fun with it now that I can pick my own topics that interest me. Although I don’t think I would ever be a teacher or professor, I do love teaching, even if it’s through a research paper or a series of Tik Toks meant to explain rocket engines.

        Finally, I believe my writing process has evolved drastically in this semester alone. Similarly to what I outlined in some of the above paragraphs, I used to dive into projects with no real plan, and start writing my final draft after my first keystroke on my document. In this semester, the longer time frames for projects made me realize that cannonballing into the essay had no hope of turning out well, and it forced me to plan, think, and draft. On the research paper, I felt stuck and lost trying to write it, going in circles of where to even start. Within an hour of stepping away from the Overleaf draft and working on my plan for the paper, the whole project made sense and saved me dozens of hours that I would have wasted for no reason. Recognizing that a firm but flexible outline for a project was needed was an area of my writing process that I had never even considered, but will be one I value greatly in the future.