ENG 2150H Portfolio Site

Portfolio Cover Letter

Throughout my academic career, I have never considered myself to be an exceptionally talented writer. I feel that my vocabulary isn’t as strong as it should be and that there isn’t much personality to my writing. I admire the writings of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, who incorporated rhythm into his writing, making his works entertaining to read. I believe that my writing does not possess this characteristic but is instead robotic-like. Meaning, a machine could have produced the same writing because the formatting is so basic. I would never experiment with my writing and “played it safe” in order to be focused on my thesis. This semester, in English 2150H, I realized that I have a lot of potential to develop the writing style I desire if I just step out of my comfort zone. Throughout high school, teachers would not allow for a lot of leniency on papers. The papers had to follow a strict formatting and fulfill the prompt. One could not write too little or too much because extra information could potentially be deemed irrelevant. In English 2150, as well as English 2100 with Professor Judah, I have learned that it is crucial I put my thoughts into my writing and expand on ideas as much as I can so that the reader understands my reasoning and will, therefore, be able to have a greater comprehension of my thesis. The assignments given out during the semester was

I enjoyed writing the rhetorical analysis of Breaking Bad because it allowed me a lot of freedom in my writing. I was actually overwhelmed with the amount of routes I could have taken in writing the paper. Therefore, I had difficulty organizing the writing. After being peer reviewed, I realized that instead of trying to fit all the metaphors in the show into one paper, it was important that I find one, which was cancer, and connect it to a few of the other key metaphors that were present. This allowed my paper to have a stronger focus, which the reader would have an easier time following. For some reason, I also had difficulty in incorporating the articles we had discussed in class into the paper. In order to relate the paper to Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson, I decided to add a quote from the article into my introduction so the audience of my paper had an understanding of what it was I was trying to prove- that metaphors exist everywhere. Incorporating Body at War by Emily Martin was simple since it was extremely relevant to my topic. The article regarded how the immune system is metaphorically described as a war zone, similar to how Walter fought cancer. I believe if I had written out one more draft, I would have had an extremely strong paper. I believe this paper would be the one that I am most proud of.

For the research based argument paper, I had a lot of difficulty in understanding what the purpose of the essay was. At first my topic was going to be about Afghanistan and how it is always portrayed in a violent state of war in film, television and the media. As I was searching through the databases for articles that related to Afghan stereotypes, I had a very limited amount of choices. I, unknowingly, wrote out a whole draft not realizing that I had strayed far away from the prompt. I failed to use cultural artifacts to prove my thesis and therefore, had to change my entire topic. Within two to three days, I had a new topic and a new paper on the single story of homeless people. With this paper, I made sure I collected a wide variety of cultural artifacts so that I actually fulfilled the prompt. This topic was much simpler and allowed me to use my voice more.

The remediation project was slightly challenging due to my lack of experience on iMovie. I believe an iMovie was the best multimedia formatting for my project since I mentioned many YouTube videos and shows in my paper. I tried to make my argument clear to the audience and also trigger some sympathy towards the homeless as my video aims to humanize these individuals.

If I could take away anything from this class, it would be to:

• Step out of my comfort zone (e.g. don’t be afraid to use a first person narrative, take a different approach to a paper, structure the essay in a different manner instead of introduction (with thesis), body paragraphs (supporting information), and a conclusion).
• Put my own voice into my writing; people are reading my paper gain an understanding of what it is I have to say.
• Don’t oversimplify concepts thinking that the audience would understand how I came to it; it is important to write out how I came to a conclusion so the reader understands my rationale.
• Annotated bibliographies can be extremely useful in writing a paper; all the key points and quotes from your sources
• Writing drafts and constantly revising them is the only way to write a paper I will be proud of.