At the beginning of ENC 1101, I thought of writing mainly as a formal academic skill. I understood that essays needed structure, organization, sources, and correct grammar, but I did not fully understand writing as something flexible and connected to identity, audience, and context. Throughout the semester, my understanding changed. I began to see writing as a process of making choices: choosing how to organize ideas, how to connect with an audience, how to use evidence, how to revise, and how to communicate meaning across different forms.
One of the most important concepts I learned was multimodal composition. Before this course, I mostly connected writing with words on a page. However, ENC 1101 helped me understand that communication can happen through many modes at the same time. Images, videos, sound, tone, layout, color, and design can all shape meaning. This connected strongly to my background as a film student because film is already a multimodal form. A scene can communicate fear, sadness, tension, or identity without directly saying it. Through this class, I learned how to explain that connection academically.
Another major concept I learned was code-meshing. My own life has always involved moving between languages, cultures, and communication styles. I was born in New York, grew up in the Dominican Republic, moved to Israel, served in the army, and later returned to the United States for college. In each environment, I had to adapt how I spoke, acted, and understood others. Before this class, I saw that mostly as personal experience. Now I understand it as part of literacy. Code-meshing helped me see that different languages, identities, and communication styles can exist together in writing instead of being separated completely.
This course also helped me understand discourse communities. In MA2, I analyzed horror fans, filmmakers, and audiences as a community that understands shared symbols and genre conventions. Horror audiences know how to read masks, suspense, silence, phone calls, shadows, and sudden changes in tone. That showed me that literacy is not only about reading books. It is also about reading situations, images, genres, and communities.
My writing process also changed because of revision. Earlier in the semester, I sometimes thought of revision as fixing grammar or making sentences cleaner. By MA3, I understood revision as a deeper process. Revision meant expanding ideas, responding to feedback, reorganizing paragraphs, adding personal experience, and making my argument more meaningful. My MA3 project shows that change because I transformed my MA2 analysis into something more developed, reflective, and connected to my own life.
Overall, this portfolio shows how I grew from seeing writing as a school requirement to understanding writing as a form of communication, adaptation, and storytelling. As a filmmaker, this matters because every story depends on choices. ENC 1101 helped me become more aware of those choices, whether I am writing an essay, analyzing a film, creating a video, or presenting my work to an audience.
