Hello and welcome to my English 182 Portfolio!

For this entire portfolio, I've decided to make my theme LOONA music videos. LOONA is a 12 member Korean pop group and I absolutely love their music. But their music and personalities aren't the only things that make them special; their music videos and songs all create a complex story when analyzed and put together. Analyzing the lore behind their music videos is honestly a lot like multimodal analysis, so I was inspired to tie in a little bit of their beautiful music video visuals into this portfolio. The attached images are from their debut music video, "Hi High". Also, their music is absolutely incredible if you're ever in the need for new tunes!

I have always been a huge fan of comics and graphic novels. Calvin and Hobbes (which makes a guest appearance in my Cultural Artefact Letter), Asterix and Oblelix, Garfield, Tintin, The Babysitter's Club, Teen Titans, and the Sunday cartoons were all a huge part of my childhood. Taking this class seemed the natural path for me, because it seemed like it would be a fun class to take for my first quarter of college. Not only do I love comics, English has always been my strength in academics. This class was a great starter choice for me because it combines two of my favorite things.

In high school, I took IB English classes which helped me greatly with this course. We analyzed visual and textual mediums often, and in this class I noticed the emphasis on visuals. However, in high school, we focused so much more on deep textual analysis by delving into complicated books. In English 182 we discussed the use of different speech bubbles, the width of gutters, and the audial aspects of comics. Overall it helped me become better at analyzing various modes. 

That's another thing that stuck out to me about this class: modes. I hadn't even heard of them until this class. Before, I had been so stuck on analyzing literary techniques that I didn't even think to consider things like spatial and audial techniques that are so common. Now I'm going to be looking for these in my future English classes, which will help me be more successful in my analysis and understanding of texts.

For this portfolio, I chose to focus on my Cultural Artefact Letter for Outcome 1 because it brings a little bit of my personality out. Since Outcome 1 is centered around writing strategies, I felt like this assignment was relevant and showed my style of writing as well as how effective I can be; this did take some revising because it was my very first writing assignment in this class and I have definitely improved since then. For Outcome 2, I chose the Market Research assignment because it successfully encapsulated my ability to synthesize different texts to find an overarching pattern. Finally for Outcome 3 I chose the Critical Conversations assignment and revised it to be more persuasive and better attuned to a larger audience. Hopefully my portfolio effectively shows my writing skills and development!

Thank you!

Gargi Pradhan

you're somewhere, I'm sure