Welcome to my online portfolio!

My name is Victoria Doose, and I’m a graduate of the Class of 2012 at Elon University. I double majored in English (Professional Writing and Rhetoric) and Art History, with a minor in Classical Studies.   

In this portfolio, you will find a representative sample of documents and projects I have worked on over the course of my undergraduate career. They are all related to my studies in professional writing and rhetoric, conveying what I have learned and also providing examples of how I have applied that knowledge. The sections of the portfolio (Contextualized Editing, Art and Rhetoric, and Document Design), along with the selected documents within them, reflect my interests as a professional writer, rhetor, and student of English and art history. The chronological order of examples in each section is intended to illustrate my professional and academic development in specific areas.

The Contexualized Editing section represents what I feel is one of my greatest strengths as a professional writer, and also one of my greatest passions: editing, in nearly all its variations. I enjoy participating in editorial processes as large as reviewing the concepts and arguments of journal manuscripts and as detailed as scouring lines of text for every grammatical error.

I have been fortunate enough to practice and hone my editorial skills as a copy editor at my university’s newspaper, The Pendulum; as a student associate for the Center for Undergraduate Publishing and Information Design (CUPID), which is a lab and workspace that provides PWR students opportunities to conduct client work, manage various publishing projects, and participate in collaborative student project work; as an editor and document designer for the program booklets of Elon University’s annual CELEBRATE! Week; and as the first editorial assistant for Perspectives on Undergraduate Research and Mentoring, an online, scholarly journal that was formed in 2010. The examples I provide within the Contextualized Editing section come from all these experiences, as well as my academic PWR experiences.

In the Art and Rhetoric section, my two majors of PWR and art history come together to exemplify the multidisciplinary nature of PWR practices and strategies. The examples include a rhetorical analysis of a literary and art journal, my own digital photography, and an art history paper examining a documentary film about an art collection. I believe the examples effectively represent the ways PWR and art/art history intersect on a multitude of levels—more specifically, they show that there can be no such thing as “purely” PWR work or “purely” art historical work because of those intersections. I chose this variety of documents and projects to show just how varied the connections between my two academic majors are; furthermore, my inclusion of the digital photography project demonstrates that the usefulness of PWR to art history is not limited to academic paper writing, but also extends to the act of artistic creation.

My final Document Design section is an area in which my attention to detail, which is perhaps most evident in the Contextualized Editing section, extends beyond examining the structures of written English and takes into account the interplay of text, space, and imagery in documents. I do not consider myself a designer, and I freely admit that my strength does not lie in creating engaging layouts and designs strictly out of my own imagination; however, I do consider myself strongly capable of viewing existing designs and determining what is effective about them and what is not. My eye is drawn to the details within document designs that are potentially distracting, confusing, or very clear and valuable to information presentation. In this way, my work with document design combines the interests and abilities exhibited in both the Contextualized Editing and Art and Rhetoric sections of my portfolio.

Each section of my PWR portfolio represents an area in which I am interested and experienced, and they each also show how I have been able to develop my skills through learning and practice in the Elon University PWR concentration. The contextual narratives that precede each document example in the portfolio walk through some of the major rhetorical decisions I faced in each project situation. Among other rhetorical concerns, the narratives address logos, ethos, and pathos; the elements of the rhetorical triangle; collaborative processes; and writing and rhetoric as organizationally situated practices.

Thank you for taking the time to read through my thoughts in this portfolio and look at the work I’ve accomplished as a PWR student in the past four years!

Sincerely,

Victoria Doose