Welcome to My English Portfolio!


This portfolio will primarily focus on the growth of my writing and reading skills that I have learned and applied throughout the semester. I know that my abilities as a writer and reader have grown in even this short of an amount of time. I am very pleased with the progress I made this semester. I know that when I first came into this class I was scared and nervous because I have not always been the strongest writer nor reader, but was ready and willing to learn.
 I think my reading skills have improved solely from all of the assigned readings in other classes and not very much in this class. Although my writing has definitely improved and developed its own style. I never thought that I had my own writing style until I looked and reviewed over the past papers we have written. I also improved on techniques and breaking old writing habits. One particular example that stands out to me is that all throughout my high school and education career thus far, I have been taught the "five paragraph essay." Mrs. Williams quickly re-routed my brain to learn other ways around that. It really became obvious in my defenition paper after the revision. I believe that with the conference and peer revision we had my essays improved alot. It was really helpful to have access to outsiders opinions because sometimes when you are writing things yourself you will overlook the mistakes.
 In my papers, my main revision I had to take care of was paragraphing and working on my thesis statements. I think the in-class writings and blogs also helped to continue to develop my writing. It allows me to put my thoughts down quickly unlike an essay where you can sit and think about how and what you want to write. I choose the journal entries I did because one of them was my overview of my writing strengths or weaknesses at the beginning of the semester. The other one focused on the construction for building our literacy narratives.I think it is interesting to look at how I assessed my self just a few months ago to now, at the end of the semester. I feel the other one was necessary to put it because it taught us how to begin the creation for our literacy narratives. The final two in-class writings I chose to involve were the ones about spam and a proper review writing. I chose to include the spam writing because I just thought it was so fun and creative, it really made me look at writing a different way. The writing about a proper review was crucial to include because it helped me to develop my last paper, which I found to be the hardest of the three.
 I chose the blogs I did because they were very different. I really wanted to make sure I included the You Tube one because it talked about technology increasing rapidly. I never thought I would have been creating a portfolio online for others to view ten years ago but now it is all possible. I chose the second blog because we had to do a group project in class over certain punctuation. My group was given the colon. At first we were overwhelmed because we were struggling to find out how to talk about the colon for ten minutes. Although in the end it working out very well, it was not as bad as we thought it was going to be by any means.The final two blogs I chose were about my last essay we did in class. It was the review writing essay. These blogs really helped me play around with ideas before we actually had to do the essay.
All in all, this class really exceeded all expectations I set forth, and I learned alot. I liked the assignments because they were not your typical research papers and what not. They truly engaged all aspects of learning and got the students involved.
I had alot of fun creating this portfolio and I hope you all enjoy it!


Biography

Blog Entries

In-Class Writing

Definition Essay

Visual Literacy Narrative

Making Meaning Essay

Review Writing Essay