This ePortfolio will document my progress in writing projects for ENGL109W—Writing for GWAR Placement. For this course, I was tasked to research scholarly texts on a topic relating to my discipline and write about my findings. My discipline is Interior Architecture. My research topic is the use of AI to efficiently develop sustainable architectural projects. With this topic, I narrowed down my focus to four sources: two scholarly articles and two website articles. The projects in this ePortfolio include the following: a proposal, an annotated bibliography, a rhetorical analysis, and a literature review. In between the major projects were minor assignments that aided in my thought process for research and organizing texts. These assignments include reading journals of the textbook The Informed Writer: Using Sources in the Disciplines by Charles Bazerman and discussion boards with my other classmates.
I achieved several learning outcomes while completing these projects. With my proposal, I learned how to compare knowledge from various professional writers and identify what texts provided valuable information for professionals in my discipline. I skimmed through sources in academic library databases and Google searches to understand what professional architects thought about utilizing AI in their work. Some sources were more opinionated while others relied more on data. With my annotated bibliography I learned how to identify sources that effectively provide information, categorize them, and compose them into a collection for professional architects to read. The four sources I chose each discuss a different perspective on my topic. The sources I found on Google were short but descriptive of using AI in architecture while the scholarly articles were dense case studies of AI with graphics and statistics. With my rhetorical analysis, I learned how to evaluate the effectiveness of a text in a scholarly environment. Analyzing a scholarly article required me to focus my reading and annotating on the authors’ message and techniques behind their text. By the time I finish writing this rationale, I am still drafting my literature review. However, this writing process continues to teach me to assess if my process of collecting texts is beneficial for my discipline’s professional community. I continue to learn that rereading and revising helps me better understand why professional writers provide information by whatever means are appropriate.