Dear E-Portfolio Reader

During the beginning of the English 101 when we began the writing process: I thought at first that we spent too much time on our essays but I soon realized how important it was spending time on the essays to improve them . The revisions that my teacher and classmates made on my essays were truly helpful for me because it allowed me to better my writing. For every week in the entire course we went over the MLA formatting process, annotating, citing within the essay, and how to make the paper flow better. I had the most troubles in this quarter when I started writing some of my essays for my portfolio because I didn’t have a clue how to start them at first. After a while of brainstorming ideas and seeing examples the teacher

While attending writing class, I learned about the 4 steps in writing, bases for revising, organizing, and connecting specific information, and I also learned about the different types of essays such as descriptive, narrative, process, cause and effect and argumentative essay. I have been a student at Milwaukee Area Technical College for 1 semester, and over the course of my enrollment I have grown and learned more that I knew prior to attending this writing course. Participating in this writing class has taught me so much more than stuff about literature and language, it has taught me another way of expressing myself. I have learned here how to write and express myself, how to think for myself, and how to find the answers to the things that I don 't know. Most importantly I have learned how important technique, outlines and organization are. My goal in this paper is to inform writers about how my writing skills have improved.

Some areas where I need to improve include transitions between paragraphs, being to repetitive, and my conclusions. This class has definitely helped me make my transitions better; however they still could use some improvement. I have to make sure that the reader can comprehend my thought process and that my transitions do not get in the way of the flow of the paper. In some of the rough drafts for my essays I could not find links between paragraphs at all but after work shopping in class I believe that they have significantly improved. I also need to make sure that I do not repeat the same ideas or words too many

I was able to develop and strengthen my writing through the writing of all six of my essays over this semester. I was able to do this by having classmates per edit my work and then go over my essay and revise it. I was able to strengthen my writing skills by being assigned six different essays over this semester.

Kane would mark through my essays where my grammar lacked, and I corrected those errors as I did more writing. Drafting and revising allowed me to see different perspectives of writing that I can include in my essay in order to lengthen it and for it to be academic. I tended to write in first person in my body paragraphs which was a major error, but I corrected that after seeing the notes that were on my revision sheet. Grammar mistakes weaken your essay since, you lose the reader of how the essay is supposed to flow, and I revised my common mistakes and avoided them throughout my essays in order to keep the reader engaged. What also helped me to write this essay was the textbook, everything’s an argument I would read the about the topic we were on, view samples of essays and I got a hint of how the essay should be. These strategies improved my writing whereas when I began this class my writing was weak and unclear and now that I'm approaching the end of this class my writing is on a college level scale and this will help me in my

Hello, and welcome to my e-portfolio! After teaching math for the last thirteen years, I have stepped into a new position. Currently, I am the Academic Dean at Pierre Moran Middle School, which is part of Elkhart Community Schools.

Lastly, self-evaluation is a key component to writing an effective essay. Even though I was able to have student feedback for my essays; self-evaluation is important for me to be able to determine my strengths and weaknesses in my writing. After composing each essay I was required to compose a self-evaluation. The evaluations describe what I consider the strong points in the essay, and were I felt I still needed to

Essay 4 was my most favorite writing assignment in this semester. I learned so much about writing with just this paper because I had to incorporate everything from the beginning of class and how to fully understand sources. With this paper I learned that citing sources is not as easy as searching google and copy pasting from the first link you find, it's more complex and delicate. When finding sources you have to find a site that is credible and the piece of information you take is relevant to the essay. When I started this research paper I asked myself a question, is lying a fallacy, then I would have to answer it with this essay. This question isn't clearly stated in my paper, it means, is lying mistaken as

One skill I greatly improved upon was my ability to gather and organize information. On my first paper, Arguing a Position (AaP), I did very poorly on this. The paper was arguing that the mass surveillance by the United States government had gone too far and was suppressing individuals’ freedoms. I spent a long time researching for this essay. When I went to sort through it all I had found that I had gathered way too much information and I had not organized it in any useful way. This put me behind the rest of the class in the writing process. I was still typing down to the very last day, while everyone else was editing, which hurt the quality of my essay. I did, however, learn from these mistakes. In my second essay, Proposing a Solution (PaS), I proposed a solution to the algae problem in Western Lake Erie. I feel I did much better at researching for this paper. I collected less information and only kept the information that I knew would be useful in writing the essay. This saved time which allowed me to put more effort into the quality of the writing. For this reason my PaS essay was much better than my AaP. This improvement shows that I have improved enough to earn credit for this course.

A major area for development and improvement revolves around effective note taking and essay planning/writing. As a Higher Education student you will be required to plan and produce countless essays in relation to the course you are studying, and a key point of reference to help with this would come from “The Guide to Learning and Study Skills for Higher Education and at Work” who give the following advice and tips: ‘Identify the purpose of the essay and who the audience (reader) is and what is required for both – structure your work and develop your arguments/main points – proof read your work and improve language, spelling, punctuation, grammar and style – review what you did and use feedback to improve your essay writing for the future’ (Bingham, R. and Drew, S. 2012 The guide to learning and study skills: For higher Education and at work).

I believe it is important for any student who wants to do their best in a class to take a moment to evaluate their own work to determine the rate their writing is progressing and how they can continue to advance their writing. When I looked through my own work I asked myself “what have I learned this semester?” and “what do I still need to learn in order to improve my writing?”. Answering both these questions will help me with my last step of my self-evaluation, developing a plan to learn new skills.

Throughout the year of writing in this class I do believe my skills have improved from where they were at the beginning of the year. I like how as we learned new writing techniques it would be a requirement in the next writing project. This helped me practes the technique by using it in my writing. The difficulty of the writing this semester was at a good place I was challenged but it wasn’t so hard I was hopeless. As a writer I have enjoyed this class and pieces we have written in it. One of the reasons why is the Into the Wild essay. With this essay I was pulled in. I pushed myself to do better than any of my other writing this year, and with the new skills from next semester I hope I can do the same.

There are several ways in which I thought I could have improved my essay. I am writing this justification paper to mention a few.

Over the course of the semester, there has been numerous amount of areas where I believe I have improved in comparison to high school. What has helped me in my writing is the writing class and the in-class writing workshop. The writing class that is located in the Kremen education building has helped me with my writing greatly because in the writing center the person in charge teach us lenses and we apply those lenses to the writing, draft, or reading that someone brings in. The in-class writing workshop has helped me because other students get to read my writing. This is helpful because I get feedback from many students and they let me know what needs to be fixed. A new tool I have been using is They Say I Say. The book is very helpful because of the information and examples it provides such as the templates. I have been applying the templates into my essays and I have seen a significant difference.

The third essay that was written was a critical argument. This assignment required me to choose two articles from the school library and write an essay stating my opinion on a particular subject. The topic I chose was medical marijuana. This topic was interesting to me, so it made the assignment fun. On this essay I had fewer mistakes than in previous essays. I continued to struggle with APA citation and the use of commas. When I looked at the feedback from this essay, it gave me confidence. I felt that I was learning and my writing skills were improving.