Self-Assessment

     Although I have always been confident in my abilities as a writer and in my capacity to write essays, the creation of this multigenre portfolio has taught me immensely that my greatest strength is in writing. When it came to doing my own visual piece, I struggled immensely with drawing or producing tangible visual output, so I decided to critique someone else's art, knowing full well that I would be lucky over the course of my lifetime to produce a hundredth of what any acclaimed artist has done in a single painting. However, my capacity as a student to judge my own work on a relative rather than objective level has increased, and I am no longer satisfied with creating work that is verbose and unnecessarily pretentious, but rather I am focused on creating writing that is at once compelling and nuanced, but also casual and readable. Doing work that I didn't like, for example critiquing art, has taught me that I need to be more visual when it comes to writing, and evoking physical sensation in the reader is one aspect of my writing that I feel has improved due to this portfolio. Besides learning about myself, I feel that the rigorous research required to complete this project has taught me how to glean the few valuable nuggets of information hidden among the enormous pile of drivel that is easily available. More than at any other time in my academic life, I feel that completing multigenre portfolios both for Catfish and Mandala and also on the question of individualism has been the most rewarding scholastic undertaking I have concluded thus far.