Dear Portfolio Readers:
When I had registered for English 101 I was nervous and didn’t know what to expect because I was never a good writer in high school. The fact that I had to put my writing on a blog read by many other students who would read my thoughts and personal experiences was even nerve wrecking for me but at the same this would improve my writing because of comments and feedback. My writing was not always on point; I use to go off topic, have run-on sentences and not know how to word things correctly usually. Another problem is that I would never know how to start and plan out my composition. During, the course of this class I have been able to improve my writing skills, and grammar errors into college pieces. I am more than happy with the final grades I have received thought out this semester and I’m happy to share them with you. They vary in topic and I hope you enjoy reading them.
My first submission was from our first assignment, a personal essay. For my topic, I chose to talk about a time in my life when persistence was an important motivating force for me. In this essay, I talked about tough time in my life from my childhood and how it impacted my adulthood as of right now. I feel that in this essay I show that I understand how to reflect on my experience and express emotions throughout my writing. While reading this work, pay close attention to my vivid images and detailing.
My second submission was using articles to answer a question of my own related to persistence. In this essay, I use two articles to answer my question about persistence. This was my first essay in my life that I had to learn how to cite my work if I was going to use other people’s writing in my work. This was the most difficult because I had to paraphrase, quote and be clear about my topic which I usually go off topic. I feel that this essay shows that I understand how to paraphrase writers from other pieces of writing, how to stay on topic while being clear and consistent about it. While reading this, play close attention on how I cite articles and relate them to the topic.
My last submission is an annotation essay. I chose this piece to be in my portfolio because it was a research essay about a topic of my interest. The topic I chose was the second most difficult thing for me because I had to develop questions and answer them with work cited which was the hardest thing for me. I also had to make sure that the information was correct to place in my essay. I feel that this essay shows that I came a long way and that I understand how to cite my work and answer research questions on a certain topic.
I feel that I learned many new skills and developed as a growing writer during this course these skills I can use for future classes I take with writing and as well as other academic classes that require work cited and sources. I am confident enough that my writing can now be used in my personal and future professional career. The main skills I learned was how to proper sentence structure, citing work and organizing a paper which I did not know how to do coming into a college writing level.
I hope you enjoyed reading my essay’s as much as I enjoyed writing them and constructing them together as a whole piece.
Coti Farias