Jake Marples e-Portfolio

Hello, and welcome to my online writing portfolio! Here you will find various works created during my time at the University of Michigan, where I am pursuing a BBA at the Ross School of Business and a Minor in Writing through the Sweetland Writing Center. The theme of my portfolio, “Escaping the Essay,” is meant to reflect my development as a writer over the course of my first semester in the minor. 

 

One of the first activities in the gateway course for this writing minor involved answering the question "What Counts as Writing?". My class' response to this question is illustrated above in the white-board image. As a class, we first tried to dissect writing into various genres such as professional writing, journalism, social media, academic writing, etc. From there, named as many examples of each genre as possible. It might seem pretty intuitive that writing is everywhere, but I didn't realize how often I'm exposed to writing until I could see it visually on our completed list. There are so many different variables that differentiate writing, and so many permutations of each variable. For example, writing can be differentiated by whether it is public (open to everyone) or private (open to select individuals) and whether it uses relatively informal or formal language. With these two factors alone we can think about examples of writing that fall in each category:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is my overly analytical brain's way of approaching the fact that there are countless forms of unique writing. When most college students hear "writing" they instinctively think "essay", but I've come to realize that "writing" encapsulates so much more. This portfolio illustrates my development as a writer, as I attempt to explore genres outside of my academic comfort zone and play around with the variables that change across genres.

 

INTRODUCTION to the PORTFOLIO