My Creative Portfolio: What Has Influenced My Writing

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.

From writing thoughtful poems to research papers, I have experienced composing a diverse portfolio of literary analysis and criticisms throughout the school year. I started out the year writing minimally. By the end of the year, I noticed I was able to express my ideas and thoughts in a more clear and concise way on paper. Ultimately, each composition allowed me to widen my horizons as a writer and see how I could improve as a writer.

This year I have learned a lot from College Writing, this class has taught me a lot about my own writing and what makes a good essay. I have learned a lot about myself as a writer and as a person throughout the course. In this reflection of the past semester I will be going through my past papers and talk about what I liked and how I could’ve made them better. I will also be going through the activities that have shaped my writing the most. Hopefully, I will be representing how I have grown as a writer throughout the year because of this class. Before taking this class I was already relatively confident in my writing abilities and was excited to take the class. Now that the course is completed I am even more confident in my writing because of all the new techniques and helpful tips I learned.

In this portfolio, I have included a variety of pieces that displays my strengths and weaknesses in my work. As I come to the end of the semester and reflect on my work in your English 112 class, I can see how I improved as a writer. English 112 has taught me many things and has helped me develop more skills as a reader. I have completed several assignments this semester such as readings, journals, multiple essays, and an oral presentation. My portfolio includes “All in the Family”, “Trapped Treasures”, “A Student Is More Than a Number”, a chosen revision of “Trapped Treasures”, my journals reflection, my personal essay reflections, my annotated bibliography, and lastly my self-assessment sheet.

Throughout the course of freshmen year I have developed different skills and opinions on writing. I feel I have created a more mature style of writing and a better understanding of literature. I have changed my view of writing over this semester and acquired a strong liking for it. The importance of writing has become more visible throughout the past few months. Writing is crucial in many aspects of a person’s life. I have grown to be a more powerful and well built writer throughout this course.

There are number of projects that I could include in my professional portfolio, but I have narrowed it down to three artifacts that I think would stand out. The first artifact that I choose is DD report, which I conducted in intro to motor behaviors class, the second piece is a fact sheet epidemiology and the third piece is a virtual child project from developmental psychology. The reason why I am choosing each of these is because they all are from different departments and areas of study. One project is from my major class, one is from my minor and the last one is from an elective class.

This is my English Composition portfolio, and it contains all the research and papers I worked on during the semester. They're my goals and comments on how i felt I performed.The topic proposals I had this semester were very educztional and interesting to me. My first paper was Social Media's impact on Cyberbullying, this was an interesting topics because it's something I always had in the back of my mind. The next couple papers having to do with field research were more group based and not individual, so I felt like my first paper was strictly about my opinion.

I have also realized that there are going to be many times you have to scrap ideas and start over. This semester I have realized that I try and perfect my assignments too much to where I start to crunch on time because it wasn’t to my expectation and I started over to many times, that there is in fact a way that too much thought can be put into a paper to where it becomes cluttered. The biggest growth I’ve seen over this semester is overall just my writing in general. At the beginning, my writing was very basic. My sentences were all around the same size and it was just not at the level of writing I would have liked it to be. The biggest thing that helped me with this over the semester would be just reading and editing mine as well as other peers’ papers. Towards the end of the semester it became easier to write, whether it was a personal, research, or

My writing skills which I have worked on over the few months I have been in English 102 have changed quite a bit in my opinion. There are many things which I have improved upon that were amongst my weaker writing skills when the year began. On the opposite side of that point, there are also many things which I still need to improve upon if I want to truly elevate my writing to a level that I will be confident in. Finally, I have gained new skills outside of writing from this class, particularly the activities which we did in class at various points throughout the year. These things all cumulate together to give me an appreciation of English courses which I did not previously have.

Overall I think that my most of my writing habits have improved and for the ones that have not I know what they are and what I need to do to improve them. My strengths that I already had as

I have always enjoyed writing, and I believed writing was a subject I was naturally good at. I turned in papers that were still rough drafts, I did not evaluate my sources, nor did I ever take the time to fully understand the prompt. It was not until my first semester of college, in my writing composition course, I realized that I had a lot of work ahead of me to be as good a writer as I thought I was. In the writing course, the students were required to compose several essays using different methods to help progress on the course objectives. The work in this portfolio demonstrates that I have used the methods of synthesis and evaluation of sources to advance my critical thinking skills and develop personal responsibility. Though I have

I believe that my approach to writing has changed over the course of the semester. My confidence in my writing has grown, as well as my knowledge in sentence structure, grammar, and word choice. At the beginning of the year, I doubted my writing abilities, but at this point, I feel as though I can handle large, intricate papers. I did not expect my writing to change drastically, but I did expect the small, technical details in my papers to improve, and I think they did. Overall, I have grown about as much as I expected to as a writer, and it has been very beneficial.

This first semester at the University of Akron has flown by. I learned many new writing concepts that helped me become a better writer. English composition was a required class that I had to take in order to get my degree. Although this class was required I still wanted to take this class to become more knowledgeable about writing. Coming into English Composition I was worried about all of the papers and the workload that I would have to complete. I knew that I was going to have to write a lot more than I previously had in highschool, but I was unsure of just how much. The works that I decided to include in my portfolio comprise of my Literacy Narrative, Image Analysis Paper, and essay titled Mayas Hardships based on Maya’s experiences in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I selected these works because I felt that they are the ones that require the most improvement to them. The papers i've chosen show how far I’ve came In English Composition.

Over the course of this past semester, my ability to write has improved tremendously. Prior to undertaking this course, my expertise in writing was not as fine-tuned as it should have been. I had never previously been enrolled in a class specifically tailored to writing-- which was quite clear. Upon reading my past works, it becomes apparent that my writing style consisted of fluff, small words, and inconsistently structured sentences. These problems have, for the most part, been remedied with the coursework I have tackled in College Writing. Rather than long, drawn out papers that take an eternity to reach the primary point, my recent work is much nicer in terms of composition and grammar. I credit these improvements to the three primary

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.