McLeod 1

Dear Malcolm,
Let me start off my extremely long letter by making note that the theme of my EPortfolio is meant to be elementary school. This is why my header picture on each page is
a child and my title on my home page is learning to write. Also, my research paper is
about elementary education and my home page and topic proposal talk about my interest
in becoming a kindergarten teacher. Lastly, I put a quote on my header that says let the
beauty of what you love be what you do because I have a passion for working with young
children and teaching them.
My e-portfolio is the first website/online project I have ever completed. I am not a
technologically creative person, however I like to think I am creative with scrapbooking
materials, poster boards, and hands-on projects. With that being said, I believe this
portfolio is teaching me how to try to bring my creativity into building a website. I wish I
knew how to build a website that looked really legit and not so basic, but I tried my
hardest to insert pictures into a couple blogs and change my font and color as well as my
header picture/quote to add a little color and flare to accompany my writing work. The
tabs on my website split my work up by topic, in order that they are listed on the
assignment sheet. I start with my home page, here I welcome viewers to my website and
talk about what the website is, who I am, and what topic my inquiry project/e-portfolio is
based on and why it interests me. My next tab is the dear Malcolm letter. This assignment
was optional to post but I thought it added a good example of writing to display where I
was at the beginning of the semester. The two tabs after that, daybook/margin outline
and blogs, fulfill the informal writing requirement of the portfolio. I decided to split
them up because I listed all of my blogs on the blog page and commented on my blog

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experience; I felt like this was a separate type of writing for me compared to the daybook
free writes and margin outline paper. My next two tabs, literacy narrative and my topic
and research, simply contain three assignments with my comments on them: the literacy
narrative, topic proposal, and annotated bibliography. After these, you can check my
extended inquiry tab to find my rough draft, final draft, and track changes of my extended
inquiry research paper. My peer review page contains a peers paper that I edited and one
of mine that she edited as well as my comments and feelings about both. Lastly, this paper
written on my semester of learning and reflection on writing will be on the tab final
reflection.
Looking back at the work I have completed this semester, my favorite section was the
informal writing (specifically daybook and blogs). Completing blogs and daybook entries
were simple and quick to complete, but still got me thinking and writing my thoughts at
least three times per week. I have not had an assignment like this in school in the past and
I honestly think its a great idea for a freshman writing class because it helped me with
what I think of as writers block. Writers block is different for me than for others because
I feel like I am permanently affected by it. I never know what to write. Informal, short
writing assignments helped me overcome this problem by forcing me to pull analyzing,
creative thoughts out of my head and put them on paper many times this semester.
I dont want to be repetitive by saying my favorite, but the literacy narrative really
was my favorite formal paper to write. I had never written a story about my reading
experience that had required scene based writing and creativity before. The reason it was
my favorite is because I felt like it gave me a lot of freedom to write whatever came to
mind regarding my feelings and memories of scenes. For my story I wrote about my

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struggle to comprehend reading in second grade. Within my story, I described scenes in

depth from my childhood of my classroom, my teacher, and how I felt. In class, before we
wrote the literacy narrative, we picked a topic and described a scene we wanted to include
in our story in our daybook. That short free-write helped me overcome writers block
while starting my paper because I already had an idea of what I wanted to say. This nonresearch based paper with no specific structure requirements was a helpful writing
assignment to have as our first formal paper because it didnt stress me out like a long
research paper would have. This paper helped me see that I struggled a little with how to
begin my papers, and how to transition from topic to topic throughout my paper. I also
learned that I enjoy creative/scene based writing, and I discovered I was pretty good at it!
Our second formal paper, the topic proposal, was probably the most simple of the four.
It was very helpful to complete, and the assignment was straight to the point. I knew what
I wanted my topic to be, and I knew why. I wanted to research the quality of American
education because I want to be an educator. Using what I already knew, I filled out the
structured paper that had four subheadings given to us. I found this simple to do because I
was told exactly what to write and where to write it. This was a scapegoat to my problems
in writing: Starting a paper, transitioning from topic to topic, and organization of topics. I
felt as though I was able to provide in depth thought, reasoning, and background
information because I wasnt worried about what I was doing wrong since it was a specific
laid out paper outline. This paper evoked thoughts about what questions I wanted to look
up and answer in my research paper. It also helped me determine whether or not my topic
needed to be narrowed down. It did. I ended up narrowing my topic down from Why is
American education ranked 36th in the world? to What is wrong in American elementary

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education, and what can we do to fix it? After this assignment, we moved on and started
our research.
My most hated assignment: The annotated bibliography. This paper was the most
challenging, difficult, time consuming assignment I had this semester. I waited until the
last three days to complete this research based paper, and it was a mistake I will never
forget. I swear, this paper alone showed me I should not ever procrastinate again. I did not
realize the amount of time it would take to find four sources related to my topic, let alone
read through them, pull information, and write about them. I thought they would be simple
to find but it seemed like every time I thought I found a good source, it hardly related to
my topic the way I wanted to, or it was a textbook that I didnt have access too. On the
librarys website I ended up finding two of my sources, and each one was about fifty pages
long. I skimmed through some of the topic pages to get an idea of what they were about,
and then I wrote up a page to summarize the information, credibility, and usefulness of the
source for my project. The whole process to find a good source, read it, and write about it
easily took me three hours. I split my work up into two days but I felt like I was constantly
working on this assignment. After all the work I did, I ended up getting a B because I
didnt have a popular news source. As absolutely awful as this assignment seems to me,
it paid off big time. I didnt realize that until I wrote the rough draft of my research paper.
My rough draft of my research paper took me a matter of an hour or two at most. The
information I wrote came almost all directly from my annotated bibliography. I had
learned a lot about my topic and how I wanted to structure my paper based on what I had
read and found through scholarly sources and case studies. I only had to do a little bit of
extra research for my rough draft paper to find quotes backing up my opinion about things

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like standardized testing and the grading system. Other things that made my rough draft a
breeze were in class free writes in our daybook. We wrote and shared ideas for titles to our
paper and our classmates helped decide one. We also wrote possible introductions and
learned about different types of introductions. I discovered in class that I would provide a
couple sentences of background on my topic in my introduction and include my passion
for teaching and why Im interested in learning more about the quality of American
Education. My peer-review partners helped me decided that would be a strong start to my
research paper.
The final draft of my paper seemed like it would be BS at first. I felt as though I had a
few grammatical errors to fix, and then a couple pages of fluff to fill in to meet the
required 8 pages. I didnt want to put stupid, random information in my paper so I decided
to create a whole extra subheading/section and include researched information on the U.S.
department of education since I hadnt mentioned them in my rough draft. This added to
my paper in terms of providing an opposition that shows that American Education is trying
to be improved and there are federal laws and budgets being put in place. Other than this
extra topic, I also added experts opinions, three new research sources, and examples in
my paper. I completed those things at your request after you edited my paper, and I am
thankful that you suggested them because I believe they really did add to the points I was
trying to make. I thought the final paper would be the most difficult assignment in this
class but I was wrong. Im finding that the e-portfolio seems to be the most specific and
time consuming assignment and the annotated bibliography was actually the most difficult
paper to write.

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The e-portfolio, which I have completed except for this reflection, is a very interesting
way to receive a grade for a class. I have never had a project like it before, and I have
never had a project that counted for half of my grade in a class. As much time and effort as
it took to complete, I think it is a very good assignment and representation of how well a
student did in a course. Putting all of my work into one place and sharing my opinion on it
all is helping me see that I have truly learned a lot in this class. I used to think that writing
was my least favorite subject and that I was bad at it, but it turns out Im not! :) I enjoy
seeing the result of a semesters worth of work and I lowkey like making a website. Im
surprised how difficult it is to create a great looking website. I couldnt figure out how to
work wix.com. My website was simpler to create because I was so confused, but I wish I
was good with technology so I could have made a prettier website. In terms of my writing,
attempt at making a portfolio, and reflecting on all of my work, I am satisfied with how
Im ending this semester in freshman writing.
At the beginning of the semester, my three main problems in writing were starting a
paper, transitioning within my paper, and organizing it. By the end of the semester, I can
honestly say that I do not have any problems with how to start my paper. When we learned
about different types of introductions, such as personal anecdotes or background
information, I understood that you dont have to jump right into the main points of your
paper. Simply introducing your topic in one of many ways and talking about what your
topic is, is all you have to do to write the first paragraph. I believe I was always so
overwhelmed with the whole paper that I didnt know what the first sentence should have
been. I think the rough draft of my research paper helped me overcome this problem the
most. I picked what kind of introduction I wanted, thought of some examples, and a peer

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helped me decide what sounded good the best. I also feel more confident with organization
of my papers, just having more experience writing formal papers has helped me get
comfortable with that unsure feeling I had about what should go where. No specific
assignment gave me a solution. I think I still struggle with transition, but only in certain
papers. I had no problem with it in my research paper, topic proposal, or annotated
bibliography because all of those papers included sub headers. The sub headers helped me
just jump from topic to topic.
One major problem I have had all my life, not just with writing, is procrastination.
With school work, projects, reading, writing... I just wait until the last minute, and under
pressure, I bang out the most impressive paper or assignment I would be able to give you. I
have made it work for me. Im not going to say that my procrastination problem has been
fixed by this class because I am doubtful that it has. However, I did not procrastinate on
my rough draft, final draft, e-portfolio, or this paper. Notice anything in common with
those assignments? They were all assigned after the annotated bibliography in which I
caused myself a huge headache in procrastinating and not being able to do my best on. I
struggled with that assignment, and had I given myself more time, I couldve easily gotten
a better grade. So I have learned a thing or two on the amount that I am able to put off
writing long papers.
I have learned a lot about what type of strengths I display in writing through this
course. Last semester I didnt think I was capable of writing quality papers and I thought I
would struggle with many aspects of writing; but it turns out, I had a lot of creativity from
the beginning and I picked up on how much I actually knew as I was writing papers,
completing assignments, and earning As! Some of my strengths include being

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descriptive, backing up my points in an argument, researching quality

sources/summarizing them, and understanding/completing assignments based on
requirements and going beyond requirements. I also believe I have quality grammar
overall. I have an occasional mistake here and there, but seeing other students papers,
then seeing mine only marked in a couple spots after grading, I see that my grammar is
probably above average. I dont want to brag by saying Im above average, but at the
same time, Ive noticed that Im not really that bad of writer, and it took me until the end
of the semester in this class to come to that conclusion.
I believe that I have progressed as a writer in the past four months because I have
gained confidence writing papers that end up being quality, high graded papers. I received
an A on all of my papers except the annotated bibliography, which I got an 88 on, and I
was happy with that grade. The grade isnt the only proof that my writing has improved
however. I have learned many things such as what a literacy narrative is and how to begin
any type of paper. I also learned how to structure an annotated bibliography before a
research paper so that the research paper is easy to complete and has well supported
information. I believe this class helped me because I can take all that I have learned and
the experience I have writing formal papers to my other classes for the rest of my college
career and teaching career and apply it to those situations. I now know that writing is not a
major stressor to me like I thought it would be and I am very happy and confident with
how well this semester is wrapping up in terms of my writing.