Project4: Portfolio Food Journal
Writing about food was brand new to me this year. Throughout the first food narrative essay, I was in shock how easy it is to write about something that everyone loves. Specifically for me, that was steamed shrimp dumplings. By telling a story of why that food is so special to me, I was able to view food differently overall. It shouldn’t be a chore that you have to eat to be able to survive. Food should be viewed as something so unique and delicious that it has to be enjoyed. Telling this narrative made me realize that my favorite foods are my favorite partly because of the memorable backstory they have.
Project 1 went pretty smoothly for my first time writing a college level essay about food. Throughout the writing process, I tried to apply the five senses anywhere I could to make the essay as descriptive and entertaining as possible. My first medium post really helped me dig deeper into what I love about shrimp dumplings and how to describe them to the readers. In the beginning of my essay, I ran into some trouble on how to introduce my relationship with food and still make the narrative well organized. However, I managed to tie in how this food in particular completely turned my relationship with food from negative to positive. What also helped me stay organized throughout my narrative was the yoga assignment. It reminded me to clear my mind and transition from one idea to another smoothly, like in yoga. I really enjoyed the freedom to this narrative and to be able to explore my writing abilities without thoroughly analyzing something first.
Final Project: Food Narrative Final Draft
At this next point in the semester, I was more comfortable writing about food. I had adjusted to writing about something that I never thought about in depth before. During this time, I had also started to branch out more in my meals and try to eat new things. I realized that I had gotten into the habit of eating the same things everyday and I wanted to change that. Even though my choices when eating on campus were small, I still did my best to order new things with more nutritional value. Also, my sorority was making amazing meals for us to enjoy as well.
Transitioning from a food narrative to a rhetorical analysis proved to be more difficult than I originally thought. I had gotten used to writing freely and appealing to the five senses to keep the story entertaining. However, for project 2, I had to start writing in a critical tone in order to analyze the benefits/downfalls to the vegetarian diet. The assignment where we chose our two articles to analyze helped me narrow down my topic and made it easier for me to enjoy what I was writing about. Throughout this project, I noticed my ability to compare/contrast these articles to greatly improve from my rough draft to my final. In the editing process between the two, I made sure to add in a new paragraph exclusively discussing the comparisons between the two articles. Professor Pahari’s feedback really guided me throughout my writing, especially during this project. The rough draft assignment helped me the most because of her comments to make the necessary changes for the best outcome.
Final Project: Rhetorical Analysis Final Draft
After writing about food in both narrative settings and analytical ones, I was definitely prepared to expand on my food debate for Project 3. The first two projects taught me how to be descriptive, critical, and organized in my writing to convey the most important aspects. At this point in the semester, I was eating a lot of new things and challenging myself to view food in a different light. I made sure to try and enjoy everything I ate instead of simply viewing food as a chore or necessity for living. This class has also helped me remove any disordered eating that I had and I no longer felt bad for eating the foods that I want to eat.
The annotated bibliography overall was a great way to summarize my research about diet culture. This was probably the project that I struggled the least on, because I was exposed to a similar topic in project 2. The Map to Synthesize Research assignment helped me organize my thoughts clearly and set me up for success with the final draft. I am a visual learner, so the act of me drawing out what I needed to say and how each article was relevant to my proposed research question was very beneficial. Another assignment throughout Project 3 that helped me was the Academic Sources Keyword Search. Before even deciding on a specific question, I was able to use keywords such as “diet” ,“culture”, “mental/physical”, etc. to find the most relevant academic articles to my topic. This made it so much easier to decide what my desired research question should be. Overall, Project 3 went very well for me and wasn’t too difficult. I noticed that my writing style stayed consistent throughout Projects 2 and 3 because they required similar types of thinking and tone. I was proud of my final draft and how well I expanded on my research.
Final Project: Annotated Bibliography Final Draft
