Dear reviewer,

Welcome to my portfolio! As a Professional Writing & Rhetoric major at Elon University, I have had the opportunity to learn practical writing skills that enhance my ability to write in a variety of contexts for diverse audiences. The rhetorical knowledge that I have gained, coupled with the professional writing strategies I have learned, allow me to be able to write as a means of social action, recommendation, organizational communication, and academic research.

I am pursuing this major because I intend to take my professional writing and rhetoric skills and apply them in ways that create social change. Although I am unsure as to my direct path, I hope to work in the social-justice non-profit world for a while and eventually go into public policy, areas in which my abilities will be enhanced by my professional communication skills and knowledge of rhetoric.

This portfolio includes documents that showcase various types of writing that I have done, from assignments both in Elon classes and classes I took while abroad in Denmark to documents I created for my internship. I intend to demonstrate the breadth and practicality of my writing skills that will be beneficial in my future career path. 

The ability to write as social action demonstrates my committment to using various types of writing to target different forms of social injustices; the ability to write as recommendation shows that I can analyze and synthesize information from an organizational perspective for a specified audience; the ability to write as organizational communication proves how my communication skills are effective within an organizational context; and the ability to write as academic research demonstrates my skills in analysis and synthesis.

I include narratives at the beginning of the aforementioned categories to describe my intention for creating the category as well as its applicability to my skills and future plans. For each document in these categories, I describe the context and rhetorical strategies that I employed, and I also include a personal reflection. The documents themselves are also either visible or accessible through a link. For the documents with visual components, I include the image and a link to the PDF version; the text-based documents are either fully included, or for length reasons are accessible in their entirety through links provided.

I hope you enjoy viewing my portfolio.

Sincerely,



Rachel Fishman