I came into this class very hesitant. Not knowing what it would be about nor what I would have to do. I knew it was an English class and I knew there would be quite a lot of writing, but besides that I had no idea what to expect. As we went through the class I kind of thought of how analyzing these various timelines would ever prove to be helpful with my major, communications. I had difficulty with this for the first part of the class, but I eventually realized that this class is amazingly helpful in my major and turned out to be a major supplement to what I am learning in my classes.
My major has a lot to do with getting a message out to the public through various mass communications technologies, such as TV, radio, and print. I have found this class to be very helpful in getting my message out through various different ways. We learned that we are now in a visual culture and it seems that we will be in that situation for quite a while. This class helps to show that we need to be able to go along with culture, no matter what it changes to. I am also now able to get my message out with more than just words. I can do it with pictures and words, pictures, or even video. I will be able to catch the attention of this culture and the audience that I am trying to get me message to. I need to be able to bend with culture in my major and this class will allow me to be able to do exactly what I need to do to get my message to the correct audiences. I feel this class will definitely help me with my major and my career.
I made quite a few revisions on my various works. my first revision on my photo essay analysis. I analyzed a photo essay about the people of Burma. It was very interesting in that it showed a very poor country where people were actually happy. I found this essay very easy to understand and I was able to get a very good understanding of what was going on, unfortunately at the time that I wrote the analysis I was apparently not able to get the words in my head onto paper. I went through and decided I wrote all the details I wanted to about the photo essay, but I was not able to get my main point across. I wrote an additional paragraph into the introduction. I decided it would be best if I write about what I felt was the main take away of this photo essay. I talked about how here we take everything for granted and we all seem to need money to be happy. I felt that the photo essay challenged that thinking and that was exactly what I wrote about.
The next thing up for revision was the Timeline assignment that I did with Kelsi Mueller and Adam Boole. We felt good about our timeline pretty much from square one. We came up with a good topic, horror movies throughout the years, and we able to get good examples of how horror films have changed since they were first made and how they have affected our culture in many ways, especially visually. In the way of revisions we decided to keep all the wording the same. our main goal with the wording was to make the words be as creepy or as scary as the movie itself. We felt we hit that right on the money with that part and decided to keep it that way. besides that we mostly just revised the size of the pictures and made them stand out a little more so as to make them a get a little more attention than they were getting.
The next thing up for revision was my photo essay. unfortunately with my photo essay I found the revision process to be a little useless in making what I was going for originally and I was not able to do exactly what I wanted to do. I instead decided to explain exactly what I was going for in the post I made on this page. I feel that the post I made was extremely helpful in showing what I was actually going for, and how that was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I feel that I made a decent artist’s statement and I hope that it makes my photo essay a little clearer.
Next came the video remix assignment. I also found this one to be to my liking in what I was going for. I was able to spoof action movie trailers and make a decent assignment all at the same time. I enjoy being funny and that was exactly what I was going for in this assignment. The only thing I had forgotten to do with this assignment was come up with an artist’s statement. I feel that I made a decent one in my post and was able to get everything I needed into it.
The final part of my portfolio is the works from my major’s classes. I, unfortunately have not had the chance to take too many classes that are directly involved with my major and are writing intensive. I did however have a class about writing articles for newspapers. I included various works from this class into my portfolio and feel that they help to show at least the beginning of what my major is going to be like and from there my career.
This class was extremely helpful to me in my major. It helped me to realize that there are many different ways I can get my message out to the public and I can get their attention a lot easier. I have a feeling that I will be using a lot of various concepts from this class in my major and extremely glad that I took this class. I will probably end up recommending this class to various other communications majors who are looking for a class to fill their upper division writing elective.
Visual Culture and Language 