Assignment/Activity Title- Columnist Profile Year- Junior

Skill- Writing \ Portfolio Competency- Critical Thinking 1.f}i 1L~

For this entry in my CAP Portfolio, I have chosen to include my Columnist Profile from Ms. Whitn~y~ J~~t.
class. This assignment was the last in a series of papers surrounding a certain columnist that we studied and rhetorical
~zed At the beginning of the project, I was assigned Amy Goodman as my columnist. The two columnist responses
were shorter assignments, and we had to reflect on the purpose, audience, and techniques of one specific article in a
roughly two page paper. The final paper was longer, and more general, about the style and techniques of the columnist.
Since we had already completed a similar project the year before, injournalism, I came into the assignment fairly
confident. It's safe to say that I was a little surprised when I received a lower grade than I expected, one of my first C's on
a major assignment. It rattled me a bit to get a low grade, as I had thought that I had done fairly well on the assignment,
and was pretty confident in my writing. When I got my paper back, I went to meet up with Ms. Whitney to discuss where I
had gotten off track, because I was confused on what I did wrong. It seemed that there was a disconnect between
expectations and my understanding of the assignment, and I was honestly a bit lost. We were able to discuss her objectives
for the papers, as well as what to look for when annotating for a rhetorical analysis. I was als~oable to give her a copy of
the next article, and pitch my ideas for the next response to her. This process was extremely hell, as it allowed me to
not only do well on the following response, but also understand why I need to ask for help w n needed. For the profile, I
was again unsure the direction in which I was expected to take, but decided to go in for help before even writing an
outline, lest I had a repeat of my first resp9llje. Again, it was helpful to be able to talk out expectations and have a solid
plan before starting, as I tend to do better out assignments with specific directions. While learning how to deal with vague
prompts is something I must work on, learning to ask for help when needed is also a skill I need to develop, being myself
an extremely stubborn person.
I placed this assigned under critical thinking because each assignment required full dissections of Amy Goodman
beliefs and words. Since each column was essentially a reflection of her core ideology, I was looking directly at how
events impacted her own life. As an example, Goodman wrote a column on Erica Garner. Throughout the piece, she
expressed her opinions on racism, feminism, gun violence, and police brutality. While I share many political beliefs with
Goodman, it took work to unpack her arguments, not just accepting them as true because we have similar ideologies.
Critical thinking relates to this process because it is the ability to think rationally about a topic without personal biases
interfering. It would have been easy to blindly accept Goodman's work as perfect because I agree with her beliefs, but to
analyze her purpose, I had to step outside my own opinions and focus on the column itself outside of my own bias.
I have chosen to include this assignment in my portfolio because of the lessons in persistence and personal
connections that I believe I developed. I've noticed that while I tend to have pretty strong perfectionistic habits, I'm also
very hesitant to ask for help when needed. I prefer to do most work on my own, and hesitate to alert others when I don't
understand something. I believe this assignment, something that was impossible for me to excel in without the personal
interactions, forced me to move past this barrier. It took effort to admit that I wasn't succeeding at an assignment. As well,
this project emphasized my beliefthat perseverance and diligence is.what one needs to succeed in life. It would have been
easy to give up after the poor grade on the first response, but continued work and visits to Ms. Whitney during lunch
allowed me to succeed in the end. Besides expanding my comfort zone, this profile also aided my abilities in concise,
intentional writing. I tend to ramble or write over page requirements in my assignments, and these papers forced me to
reflect on which sentences were necessary, and which I could do without. The reminders that this project granted me in
evaluating my own writing abilities is why I placed it under the skill of writing.

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