Hello and Welcome to my Digital Portfolio! On this website, you will find the work that I’ve done throughout the 2022 Fall Semester for my FIQWS 10105 (Fairy Tales and Rewritings) class. The assignments that are included on this website are my Exploratory Essay, Research Critical Analysis Essay, Rhetorical Analysis Essay, and the many journal entries that I’ve done throughout this semester. These assignments focus on the fairy tales that we’ve covered throughout the semester and how I’ve interpreted these different stories. 

For our first assignment, the Exploratory Essay, we were asked to choose one of the fairy tales we had read so far and select three outside sources that would help expand our thinking on the fairy tale and address a topic/question we had after analyzing the story. For my essay, I decided to center it around the fairy tale of Cinderella, and how the topic of basketball is correlated and shares similarities to it. The idea of this essay was to research similarities of real-life scenarios that happen in college basketball and show the readers how obscure topics like basketball can have similarities to works of fiction. 

During the writing of this essay, it has helped me achieve two course outcomes. One of the outcomes that I feel I was able to achieve during the period of my writing this essay was being able to practice and implement systematic application of citation conventions throughout my essay. Throughout my essay, I was constantly citing many different authors and works to argue and implement my claim and this can be seen in any of the body paragraphs and work cited page. The other course learning outcome I feel I was able to achieve during the period of this essay was being able to locate research sources in the school database/archives or the internet and be able to evaluate them for credibility, because during the research part of this essay, we had learned how to maneuver through our schools database and use advanced searches that used keywords to describe our topic that allowed us to find critical sources that were used throughout my essay. Also, being able to identify whether or not a source was credible or not was of great help because in the essay, I used specific terminology that only people within the pro/college sports scene would understand, so being able to figure out the author’s credentials was helpful to find my sources.

For our second assignment, the Research Critical Analysis, we were asked to take the information that we’ve learned throughout our research and argue a position. Using the research, we will formulate an opinion on a facet of your topic and then try to persuade your audience on this position. In this assignment, while we had the option to expand on our idea that we had in our exploratory essay, I decided to switch it up and instead focus on the fairy tale of Bluebeard and try to convince the reader that the underlying meaning of the story was of a wife going through a domestic violence situation. 

After finishing this essay, some of the course learning outcomes I feel I was able to achieve through the process of this essay was composing texts that integrate my stance and language with appropriate sources, using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation. I feel I was able to touch upon this learning outcome because throughout the essay, I had to be creative with what sources I used and how I interpreted them to become evidence that backs up my claims since most of the articles and text on the city database didn’t apply to my topic and I found it really difficult to relate the two topics together, but by using strategies such as interpretation, critical analysis, and argumentation, I was able to use sources that didn’t really touch on the story of Bluebeard and apply that to my overall argument. Another learning outcome I feel I was able to achieve was locating research sources in the library’s databases or archives and on the internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias. For this essay, I used the city database to try and find credible sources and it was very difficult as there weren’t as many articles talking on both the topic of domestic abuse and the story of Bluebeard and we needed a total of 4 secondary sources. So instead, I was able to search on google scholar for more options and found very credible sources from government official websites that touched on the process of domestic abuse which I used to debate and analyze the situation that Bluebeard’s wife was in.

For our final assignment, the Rhetorical Analysis Essay, we were given an article and told to identify the components of a rhetorical situation that were shown such as author, audience, tone, genre, medium, etc. 

After finishing this essay, some of the course learning outcomes I was able to achieve were being able to recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations as I was able to read the text and then analyze all the different key terms and use the proper strategies to tackle each situation. This can be seen throughout all of the essay. And the last course learning outcome was ways to practice systematic application of citation conventions as I quoted some of the text from the article that we read for the essay.