Portfolio Reflection
I want to start off by saying I have never liked writing essays, not because of the professors or the classes itself, but mainly due to my inability of writing clear and concise essays. It seems that even though I spend hours writing a paper I can never get my main message across to the reader. Therefore this class was challenging for me in the beginning especially with the first assignment. The first assignment prompt confused me and I was not sure on what to do or what to write. Which is why I lost a lot of points for the final draft. However as we moved on to the second assignment, and began learning on what the class was mostly about, writing the essay became easier. However, it seems that I had a consistent problem with both of my essays in that they both lacked a central claim or question. When I was writing both of these essays, I thought I had a central thesis in the introduction that allowed the reader to understand what I was writing about and what I am trying to say. With the feedback that you wrote for me I noticed that I did a bad job at getting my point across and it just confused you. My essays did not have a clear reason to be written and did not show a “why did you write this” sort of claim. Especially with the first assignment I had to take a longer time revising each paragraph and making sure it made sense to the reader and with the overall topic of the essay. Your feedback was very helpful in letting me recognize what was wrong with my work. But I still don’t think it helped me as a writer. Not because it is your fault in any way, but I just cannot write essays. There have been many different writing styles that I have learned from my professors and teachers in high school, but you have taught us to write in simplicity and be able to analyze the work thoroughly. The one thing I can take out of writing both of these essays is that to focus on your central claim the most. Without a central claim in your introduction, the person reading the paper will have no idea what to follow. I never spent a lot of time making a central claim for my papers so I hope that it could help me improve my writing in some way. My most proud work during this semester was probably the second assignment since when I looked at my revisions, it was the least points taken off compared to the first assignment. I did put a lot of work, time and research into writing the second assignment but I did not expect that outcome. I think the reason for the improvement in the second paper was that I understood what the prompt was about and what I needed to research about. But as I said before, neither of them had a central claim, so that is one important thing to learn from this class. Although the central claim is an important aspect in the essay, there is still more work in my writing needed to perfect my papers. Since my intended major is accounting, I will probably be writing several reports to many different important people. So being able to show proper papers or messages would definitely make me need to improve my writing. But I still have three more years to improve it and hopefully learn many other different things in future English courses. But I know I will continue to struggle in other courses just like this one because I cannot write essays properly. My revision process for assignment one took more time and effort to comply with all the suggestions, comments, and revision tasks that you have stated. Since it was the first paper in the class I had many mistakes as well as confusion into what I really had to write about. It took some time to reorganize my thoughts in the first assignment since it has been a long time since I wrote it. Being able to look back on it now, did make me see how different my writing style has changed. I hope that with the new changes and the central claim that I implemented throughout my essay will make it clearer now. For my assignment two I took a more different approach to revise it. I started off with the comment that you wrote online in order to fix the small problems first. I know you said not to do this but there was not as many comments on it than the first one had. I then looked at my paper into a broader perspective and try to organize it around one single claim rather it being just a mix of immigration laws. Assignment two took less time to complete but I still put much effort into it. As I was writing both of these assignments I thought I had made my thesis clear and cohesive, but putting too much information into the introduction made it confusing. I had to minimize and change the way I wrote both of my introductions and conclusions so my essays make sense. I even included some more information in my body paragraphs to explain my claims in both essays. The more interesting and creative work was the last assignment with the cultural product. I felt like with this last assignment we were not restricted to what we could do and just make any product we want as long as it fell under our theme of civil unrest. We took a while to finally figure out to make a mini series on each of our parts by creating separate stories relating to our research. The difficult part behind this process was trying to connect everyone’s story in some way and in the same timeline. But after we made a connection, we were able to be creative with our writings. I decided to look back at my second assignment to get some ideas and help me write my story.
Overall, the concept of the class was confusing to me; however, I eventually caught up and began understanding what was needed from us. I have never enjoyed essays due to my inability in writing them, but I hope that by being able to spend more time in analyzing rather than describing, and taking time into creating a strong central claim will help me write better essays later on.