3 Charting New Constellations in your ePortfolio

What’s happening in your body and mind as you read these words? Where do your eyes linger, and where do they skim? How does it affect you if I use an interjection — for emphasis — or if I add details (in parentheses)? Could I measure what’s happening in your brain, in your mind, in your emotions, as you read? Can I improve the quality of communication between us by asking more questions, or is that only useful up to a point? Would you have a better time if I wrote in rhyme?

And how does this question hit different standing by itself on the page?

And how will that question “hit” 10 years from now when slang has evolved? Will my editors want me to write, “How does that question hit differently?” because my usage isn’t strictly correct? (They didn’t.)

As you reflect on your work for your ePortfolio, you might be asking yourself similar questions: What message am I sending by emphasizing a particular project? Who will see my ePortfolio, and what will they think of it? What could I do to make this component stronger?

Your ePortfolio is your chance to tell a story — or, to put it in fancier terms — to communicate a narrative. And because you’re telling a story, it might help to think of yourself as a creative writer.

When we talk about so-called creative writers, we often mean someone who writes short stories, poems, novels, and nonfiction essays. Given that definition, you might think the only kind of discipline you need to be a creative writer is the self-discipline to put in the work on your craft. Except, that’s not entirely true. Regardless of what I’m writing — a poem about hiking on Mt. Lemmon, a story based around a neurodivergent character, my contribution to this UNIV 301 reader — my writing is an exercise in interdisciplinarity and perspective-taking.

Why interdisciplinarity? Primarily, because of the power of intertextuality — we process every text we encounter in relationship to every other text we’ve ever encountered. I could have opened this essay with the words, “Once upon a time,” and a little part of your brain would have shouted, “Fairy tale!” Even without your conscious mind getting involved, your brain notices intertextual connections between what you’re reading now and other things you’ve read, watched, listened to, and thought about.

The same is true for writing. My style is informed by years spent as an environmental lawyer writing arguments and legal interpretations, by decades of textbooks and poetry collections and novels and emails and news articles, and even by the cartoons I watched over the weekend. Writers can consciously choose to use a particular voice, style, or persona, but as humans, we are always holistic beings, informed by all the stories around us. In that spirit, the act of writing — like the act of reading — is not just a mono-disciplinary process. You have a galaxy of diverse texts in your mind, and they span a wide variety of disciplines, genres, and media. When you add a new story — your ePortfolio — to that starry sky in your mind, it will be intertextual by virtue of its connections to the many texts you’ve consumed and created. It will also be interdisciplinary because you, the author, are informed by many disciplines.

Whoa. That’s a lot.

I often ask my students what they like or dislike about a given text before we dig into what made the piece successful. How do we measure the success of any writing? By reading comprehension — whether a group of readers of a certain age can pass a quiz on the material? By economics — whether it sold a certain number of copies? By the experts’ opinions — whether an authority, like your professor, said it was good?

Sometimes, both in college and in the professional world, you’ll be tasked with writing something that feels pretty mono-disciplinary. Sometimes, chemists write for other chemists, poets write for other poets, and marketers write for other marketers. But that’s not the point of your ePortfolio. When we aren’t just writing for ourselves and people like us, we have to think about that vast intertextuality and write in a way that helps others make meaning and find value in our work, a way that helps them add our story to the array of texts in their mind. Sometimes, that means making connections across disciplines so our readers don’t have to.

And that brings us to perspective-taking.

Even if I am stuck in my own head when I first start writing a given piece, every act of revising, proofreading, and editing is an opportunity for me to practice perspective-taking. I’ll ask myself how different readers will experience my work. What will a non-hiker take away from my Mt. Lemmon poem? How will a neurotypical person feel during my portrayal of autism? How will a Gen Z reader process my question-heavy introduction?

Maybe you’re thinking, “But I’m not a creative writer!” Maybe you’re not, but you are a communicator. That’s really what we’re talking about here, because all communication, all storytelling, is an opportunity for perspective-taking and interdisciplinary thinking.

As you craft your ePortfolio, imagine the MC at an awards ceremony reciting your accolades in front of a crowd. Who is in the audience? Your UNIV 301 instructor is in the front row, but who else might be there? How would it change your ePortfolio if you considered the perspective of first-year students who might read your work someday? Or if you wrote for someone in another discipline, who could do something unexpected with your work?

Imagine three people in that crowd with different galaxies of texts, experiences, and disciplines in their minds. How does the new story you’re shaping — the story of your ePortfolio — look from their point of view? How does that change the way you reflect on your own work? What are the constellations you want everyone to see?

About the author

name: Jennie McStotts

Jennie McStotts (she/they) graduated from UA under the old general education system (so you can take her word that this one is a big improvement). As an undergrad, she majored in changing her mind about her major, but over a couple decades she eventually collected degrees in creative writing, preservation, museum studies, and law. Nowadays, she collects dogs and socks — much easier! All of those degrees have three things in common, though: applying interdisciplinarity, not-short writing projects, and life lessons about how to keep up your motivation over the long haul.