Evie Giaconia

2 December 2015
Final Portfolio Analysis

Completing these projects enabled me to get a much better look at my chosen

discipline. I learned a lot about writing rhetoric in my fieldspecifically, anthropology.
This was actually very important to my studies because I only just switched my major to
anthropology. Despite still being hesitant over the switch, I did my projects in this field in
order to get an idea of what kind of writing goes into and comes out of the discipline. I
found it was much like scientific writing, in that there is a large divide between academic
and professional writing. In addition, I learned some of the threshold concepts that you
must know to be any kind of professional anthropologist, as I discussed in the beginners
booklet that I made for my second project.
I was able to really delve into research in anthropology, something I had never
really done before. In the first essay, I explored two different sources and got a good idea
of not only the steep divide between professional and academic sources, but also what
makes them similar. Additionally, I got to know the genre of writing that I will be
expected to produce as a professional anthropologist in the future. This series of projects
made it a little easier to accept the change in majors, something that was causing me quite
a bit of stress. During the second project, in which I created a booklet for beginner
anthropologists, which I am, I was able to teach myself about the discipline along with
the imagined audience I wrote to.

My writing process pretty much stayed the same through the semester, though my
tone was a little less casual in the second essay than the first. Ive never had trouble
writing formal essays, and there wasnt much variation in how I went about it. However,
during the third project, it was a challenge to try my hand at Rogerian argument. It went
against every essay-writing instinct thats been trained into me since middle school, and I
desperately did not want to compromise over the subject of transgender rights. I settled
for discussing what causes the issue in society, and dissecting how that inspires violent
transphobia in people.
The multimodal ethnography, however, definitely had a different writing process,
because I was writing in the persona of both a professional and a novice. In writing the
initial booklet, I adopted a lecturing tone, one of an experienced professional talking to a
beginner. When I came back in and edited the booklet as someone actively using the
guide, I took on a voice of a student, making corrections and notes in the margins. That
voice was much more casual and loose than the professional. This was a very interesting
process as far as writing went, because I had to be sure that my tone matched the voices I
wanted to portray.
When going from a shitty first draft to a final polished draft, peer reviews made
the most difference. Often, however, some of the peer reviews I got in class were not the
most helpful: I didnt get a lot of good criticism from my classmates. I asked a friend who
is not in the class to go over my papers a few times, and her revisions proved to be more
helpful than many of the comments I got in class, especially for the first project.
As for corrections, in the first draft I made quite a few. Once I had my initial peeredited paper, I sat down and re-typed the entire thing, changing quite a bit of it. It will be

easy to see in the side-by-side comparisons. Additionally, when I then received my videoedited critique, the most obvious thing I needed to change was the informal voice. I
attempted to ferret out any remnants of the too-casual tone in my final portfolio draft.
In the booklet, I did not make many changes. It was a hard-copy draft that I wrote
and drew in, and would be very hard to make corrections in: I would have to go back and
re-do the entire booklet from scratch. Luckily, there were no major changes that I needed
to make.
Likewise, the third essay did not need many changes. One comment I heard from
many of my peers was that I did not give enough consideration to the other side of the
argument, which I agree with. After all, I was having trouble compromising in the first
place. In an effort to counter this I added an additional paragraph about how transphobia
stems from ingrained sexism in society and emerges as horrific violence. Again, my idea
of giving consideration to the other side was to discuss the causes of the aggression and
hatred we see in society.
These projects definitely helped me explore writing in my field. I got a crashcourse in anthropological writing, from academic to professional sources, including the
web resources commonly used in the discipline, such as the AAA, American
Anthropological Society. These critical concepts will be highly useful to me in my
coming classes, especially in my major classes. In high school, when my planned major
was biology, I had as much of a background as one could have through high school
biology classes. However, now that I am in anthropology, I am realizing that there
werent that many courses in high school that could have really prepared me for it.
History classes were the closest thing to it, but really the tenants anthropology are

something you have to learn through college and experience alone. It is an interesting
contrast, but not something I think will slow me down too much. Regardless, I am
grateful that I got to get a sampling of the kind of work that I will be dealing with in the
near future. I am sure, however, that there will be conventions that I am unaware of that I
will have to conform to when writing formally in the discipline of anthropology, and I
will have to do much more reading in the future to determine those for myself.