Amanda Bonet Tkacs
5/22/17
ENG 2150-KWMF
Final Portfolio
Looking back on the essays and projects done throughout the course of this semester, I came to realize that I have gained valuable writing skills that I will continue to carry with me for future classes and even for my personal life. I have noticed the progress I have made from essay to essay. I feel like I have always been a somewhat decent writer, but for Essay 1 I was able to see how my writing process could be more refined and more organized than how I usually do it. I feel like this is something I carried with me for my other essay and for the final project as well. I was able to organize myself much better and be able to narrow down my ideas to focus around my intellectual problem, in regards to my first essay, and to my research topic for my second essay. Even for my final project I was able to put more thought into my decision-making process to better suit my audience and make my project more focused. Thus, I consider that to be my biggest takeaway from this class. I do feel like I have always had certain skills that I put into play when writing essays, such as exploring different ways of approaching it to make it more appealing and taking into consideration how my readers will understand my message, but being able to organize myself better made the process smoother. I also feel like I was able to learn something from every essay/project; from Essay 1, I learned how to make my writing process more organized, from Essay 2 I learned how to narrow down my research, and from Project 3 I learned what to take into consideration when choosing an audience. All of these are skills that will continue to help me for future projects, no matter what class or type of assignment.
Throughout the course of the semester I feel like I was also able to work towards the goals from the syllabus, especially the first and the last one. The first one speaks about critically analyzing text of different genres; I believe I learned how to do that effectively after doing the close reading exercise for the essay Speaking In Tongues. After that exercise I have been able to dissect sentences and essays as a whole in a way I was not able to do before. The last goal on the syllabus speaks about using conventions according to your audience. I was able to really take this one into consideration for Project 3; choosing an audience was something I never really had to do before, thus having to do so made think about other aspects of my project, such as my word choice and the best way to effectively communicate my message. In addition, I was able to work towards the goals of each of the prompts. For example, for Essay 1 I felt like I achieved all of the goals of the assignment; I identified an intellectual problem and worked with it to reach a claim, I provided evidence that supported both my intellectual problem and my claim by doing close reading, and throughout the process of writing my essay I was able to answer the “so what?” question, which guided me towards my claim. For Essay 2 I feel like I was unfortunately not able to achieve all of the goals, but I was able to work towards the first and third goal; I clearly articulated my own research problem about mental illnesses and I used the Baruch Library as a way to find relevant and important information about my topic. And for Project 3 I consider the first goal to be the one I worked towards the most. Although I was able to do a little bit of all of the goals, revising my essay argument for a new audience and a new medium was the hardest task for me, but I ultimately did it in a clear and effective way. In short, every assignment helped me become a better writer, and that is something I value a lot as not only do I enjoy writing for personal reasons, but it is something that will be part of my life forever, whether for simple things as emailing someone or for work-related tasks for the future.
Overall, I have always viewed writing as something very rewarding and crucial to everyone’s life, whether they want to pursue it on a more professional level or simply for everyday life. I have always been a very shy person who does not express much face-to-face, thus writing has always been my outlet for sharing my emotions, thoughts, and ideas. But, even though I have always enjoyed it, I often had this naïve idea that getting good grades and hearing others say they like what I write meant that there wasn’t much more left for me to do other than simply continuing to do what I have always done. However, taking this class made me think otherwise. Throughout this semester I was able to gain various skills I always thought I had but in reality did not, such as making drafts rather than beginning to write down everything in my mind and making changes along the way, narrowing down all my research and ideas, modifying my work for my readers, and so on. Another valuable lesson I learned this semester was that writing does not necessarily have to be an individual process. As I mentioned above, I have always been a very shy and private person, so I never shared any of my writing before turning it in to my professors or letting others read the finished piece, but doing peer-review forced me to step out of my comfort zone and put myself in a position where I had to receive feedback from others, and even harder, from people I did not know. This exercise made me feel more comfortable with receiving constructive criticism about my writing and it ultimately lead to me being more comfortable about my writing as a whole.
I definitely do not see myself as a skilled writer any time soon, but I do see myself as a better one. Now that I look back on the work I have done this semester, I believe I could have done better, but I am still very proud of myself for the progress I made and I am eager to see how much more I am able to achieve with the help of others and with the important lessons I was able to acquire this semester in this class.