Dear Portfolio Committee,
I have never thought of myself as a writer. I have never given myself that distinction because the words appear on my page exactly as they rattle around my head on a day to day basis. But I suppose if thinking critically about something is what it means to be a writer then I am always writing, for better or worse. Before entering this class, I had already taken college-level writing classes in high school. I passed the AP exams, but felt the need to reacquaint myself with the writing process and to rediscover myself as a student. I had a lot of fun with it. When I entered this class, my identity as a writer was limited strictly to my experience in classrooms. Although that has not changed, this college writing class has given me the opportunity to play around with my process and hone my skills while improving my weaknesses. The professor always had great insight and pushed me to better my writing with her comments. I really appreciated how nit-picky she could be, as I have come to learn in writing as in many things, it is attention to the smallest of details that add up to a great piece.
The first essay I have chosen to include in my portfolio is the memoir piece. I felt this piece gave me a chance to break away from the rote and informal process of academic argument and rhetorical analysis I had become accustomed to in high school. It was one of the only times in my life I had the freedom to put something of myself in an English paper. What ended up on the page was a funny retrospective about my grandmother, and this surprised me, as I have never really explored this side of myself through my writing. Once the words started coming out and I realized what the tone was I tried to follow the trend my brain had set for me and to keep the tone light hearted and funny. One of the things I made a conscious effort to change in this piece after receiving feedback was to improve the level of detail and frequency of imagery. I am naturally sparing with providing details like this when I tell a story and still recognize a need to improve in this regard. I was pleased with the improvements it had on the final draft of the piece. I have placed this first in the portfolio because I feel it may give the readers a sense of my personality before we dive into the more academic pieces to come, which have less of “me” in them.
The second piece I have included in my portfolio was the text wrestling assignment. While I have never considered myself a writer, I am an avid reader. I enjoyed this assignment as it required getting to know the article I chose inside and out, and extracting the main point while analyzing the author’s rhetorical choices. The piece itself proved to be a challenge for me, as it has been so long that I had to write an analysis. My main challenges here were organization, and responding to the text in a meaningful way, mostly because I agreed with the piece so strongly, that I felt it didn’t need my commentary.
The final piece in my portfolio is an argument piece. I enjoyed writing this piece because I am contrarian by nature, and so it is fun to showcase my unusual perspective on things. My thesis here was on a topic that I am very passionate about, in part because I myself have some chronic health issues related to the topic, but also because I see many people suffering from their diets, even if they themselves are not aware of it. Since I have a strong personal interest in the topic, the research compiled in the piece was done before I even started writing. I can remember times on practice AP exams where I had virtually nothing to say on the subject at hand, and so I felt fortunate that I was able to choose the topic to argue on. The main problem I had with this piece is that I could expand on this topic to write hundreds of pages. I don’t think my professor would have liked that much, nor would I be up to the task of writing it under the time constraint given. I was forced to narrow the topic down and water down much of the information to support my thesis, even though I was not sure if the information would be sufficient for a reader who did not have much prior knowledge of the topic.
I am glad I took the time to take this English class to rehab a skillset that I haven’t had need of for years. The projects allowed me to gain further insight into who I am as a writer, and forced me to dive deeper into topics I am passionate about to improve my ability to share that passion with others. I thank you for taking the time to read my words here.