English 1105: Portfolio by D.Jason Nam

RELAX. ENJOY.

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E x p l o r e.

Part One.  Blog Entries  |  In-Class Writings  |  Literacy Narrative  |   Culture, Society, and Me

Hello. Nice to meet you. Have a seat. I would like to present you some of the works I have produced within my first semester in English 1105.

Let’s take a look at the Blog Entries I have done so far. The first blog entry I would like to share is titled “(Not So) Happy Mother's Day”. I particularly enjoyed writing this blog post because I enjoyed reading the visual narrative about the baby girl and her evil mom. I strongly believe that good work comes out when one’s emotions are at the peak – whether that’s very happy or very depressed emotions. This specific image of the girl brought up both happy and sad emotions at once. That’s why I loved it, that’s why I analyzed it, and that’s why I chose to share it.

The second blog entry is my view on group projects. I choose this entry as my second choice because it marked my first “Imma be different” moment in class. As written on the entry, I have always struggled with perfectionism. I don’t know anyone that loves bad quality work, but I also don’t know that many people that torture themselves to produce high quality work like I do. So – back to my main point – I decided to cut back on my perfectionism when I came to college. Because I know I might explode from stressing out too much about every little detail when producing work. I do have a secret though… I spent over five hours just trying to make my online portfolio look “un-cheesy”. Whoops!

Next up is the In-Class Writings. When I went back to see the in-class writings I have done, I must say I was quite embarrassed by them. None of them seemed to be good enough to add it on my portfolio. After reminding myself that these writings were just short and quick writings to jot down responses, I chose the two that were the least embarrassing. So don’t be too quick to judge! :) 


Enough with writings – let’s move on to some Visual Literacy Narrative! Well, there still will be some writings, but there will also be a YouTube video! This was one of my favorite projects of all time. I had an absolute blast making the movie and somewhat of a good time writing my essay. One revision I made on the movie was at 1:21 when my friend pointed out that I had misspelled the word “architecture”!!!! What a shame. In terms of the paper, the only big revision I made was changing the title from the mundane “Visual Literacy Narrative” to “My Love for Architecture” (and this time I made sure I spelled it right). My hope is that these two changes made my movie and paper twice as exciting. :P

To conclude our little talk now, I would like to say that through English 1105 with Nicole Williams (it’s so weird calling her by her first name), my writing has indeed improved over the semester. Although two months weren’t long enough for my actual writing skills to substantially improve, I do feel that my confidence in writing has gone under a major boost. Like, for real. The short, write-what’s-on-your-mind, in-class writings were helpful in a sense that I did not have to worry about being graded on my grammar and/or punctuation. Nicole really stressed to her students the importance of being free and creative thinkers. And I think she will be happy to hear that she is well on her way to achieving that goal.



P.S. Make sure y'all check out our latest project for English 1105 - Culture, Society, and Me - it’s tight.