GABRIELLA RING

In the Gateway course, we are asked to follow one piece of writing through a series of stages that ultimately lead to the creation of our electronic portfolios. Each decision requires careful planning. I battled between ideas often before finally settling on what I really liked and wanted to do. To start, we were required to choose a text we had written in the past on something we felt strongly about, or a piece of writing that we could mold and transform without getting to bored with it. Choosing the original piece I would like to use for re-purposing was difficult because I had the feeling I was marrying my piece, and divorce was not an option in a project that spans semester-long.

 

I ended up choosing a creating writing piece I wrote for my English 223 class winter of my sophomore year called “Dark Matter.” The original audiene was my peers in the class, my professor, and other friends who I chose to share the story with. The story is in the point of a view of a girl who has her first experience blacking out freshman year of college. The theme I wanted made apparent throughout was all the possibilities we miss out on when we black out. In the story, the last thing the narrator remembers is waiting to get into a party. The next scene flashes to her waking up in the hospital and the aftermath of the consequences of her choices.

 

For my re-purposing piece, I chose to write a piece in the style of Malcolm Gladwell and the New Yorker. “Booze, Boys, and Banging Up My Body” explores the complexities of underage binge drinking in the college environment, told from somebody with experience with the culture. I wanted to open up with an ancedote similar to what the narrator experiences in “Dark Matter.” After the introduction, I go into real statistics about how the problem continues to grow and what my thoughts are on it. If everyone knows that drinking to excess is bad for your body, brain, and just about everything in life, why do we continue to do it? While I was hesitant with this topic because so much literature already exists on it, I hope that my piece adds a new voice to the conversation that has been ongoing ever since students found out that drinking could lower their inhibitions and help them escape from the stresses of classes and work.

 

My re-mediation piece is intended to take the re-purposing piece to a new media form. Again, I was on the border of whether or not to do a podcast or a tumblr page. Podcasts would be something that people who have to sit and listen through entirely to get a clear picture of my argument. In a tumblr page, the reader is more able to freely scan the piece overall and then hone in on what they want to read more of. I was excited about the use of tumblr because I had no experience with it prior to the project.

 

For my tumblr page, I decided to put the cover photo of red solo cups, and an avatar of a liquor bottle to situate the reader within the context of the college drinking environment. The page, called “Used and Abused” is a variation of the title to my re-purposing piece. Posts on the page are displayed in reverse chronological order, a feature of tumblr posts. I begin by visually representing points in the story like the University of Michigan Health System logo and the I’m Shmacked YouTube video for Michigan. Each post comes with a caption that relates back to the overall theme of exploring why drinking is so glorified in the college environment.

 

While we are introduced to the entire semester-long project at the Minor orientation, it really isn’t until you start doing the work that you can appreciate how rewarding it is. The pages on this portfolio seek to illustrate that process. Enjoy the journey of exploring each stage.