Westin Banks Portfolio essay Final essay English

There are many different ways for me to go about organizing my portfolio. The way that I chose is to just organize all my papers in the order of importance. The first paper I would say that is was most important after the portfolio is the literary narrative and my pages continue to go in order of importance what I learned/struggled the most with. I put my literacy narrative first because I believe its one of my best writing of the semester and it also tells a lot about my character and who I am. For each page I tried to add a picture that pertained to the paper that I wrote. For example for my swimming story I included a picture of me swimming. For my Midterm I included a picture of my high school because a portion of that paper contributed to my school writing. For my blog page I tried to include some funny pictures that might have described how I felt or thought about blogging at the beginning of the semester. Lastly I tried to make my feedback page as easy to understand as possible because this was a section where it could have got a little confusing. I included a slide show of the most important feedback that I got this semester. Ive learned a lot from all the writings we did this semester the one writing that I would say that told me a lot about myself would be my literacy narrative. This paper I can say was one of the easiest ones for me to write this semester. It was easy to write but I would say one of the most important because it was such an important event to me and I could remember it like it

happened yesterday. A visual that I will use for this paper is a picture of me swimming just to make the story more vivid and actually make you picture the pool. My first draft for this paper was pretty much the same as the final draft I just added a few changes from the feedback I received from my teacher and my peer editors. My literacy narrative was about how I was cut from my swim team during tryouts and I went and got lessons and tried out again and made the team. I learned from this writing about language and how it revolves around everything we do. I learned how to tell a vivid story while still keeping my audience engaged. You can tell this from my intro to the essay. I can remember it like it was yesterday, the water splashing the coach yelling and me wondering what I got myself into. It was freshman year and I was a skinny young 14 year old naive kid thinking I was the greatest swimmer on the planet. That was all until I went to my first swim team try out. I would say this might have been the best part of my essay because it really sets the tone for the whole story and I feel that it really puts an image in your head. I also learned how to input dialogue in my story which was a tip that I got from my peer editors and the syllabus. The dialogue in my essay really shows how I used language to overcome the fear of talking to my swim coach that turned out into being a really influential person in my life. This piece was really a part of me because it changed the way I looked at a lot of things. It told me that I can do anything I put my mind to and to never take no as an answer if its something that really makes you happy. All these values really still stick with me to this very day. My genre assignment really helped me see how far that I have come from high school. It really showed my growth as a writer from being a senior in high school to being a sophomore in college. It showed me how to analyze two totally different texts and find the similarities and differences. This assignment showed me how to find the purpose in writing and how to identify

the messages that I was trying to convey and finding out which purposes is recurrent. For example two things that I found that were similar Both of my texts are stories about something in my life. One thing that is similar that I find important is that they both have implicit and explicit messages. In my college writing my implicit message was the facts that fear and intimidation can consume you to the point where you cant function at your best. In my high school writing I can say that my implicit message was The message that I really was trying to express is that sometimes you have that exact moment in your life where you realize what you are supposed to do with it and thats what this paper expressed. I also learned that a great intro is a key to getting your point across and fulfilling your purpose which was achieved in both my high school and college writing. Lastly a key fact that I got from this assignment was that if there is a rubric for any paper that your writing that you should really stick to as close as possible and not venture off to much and get off topic. The mid-term I would say was one of the essays this semester that helped me grow the most because in my mind it was the hardest one for me to write. It was hard for me to write because there was so much distance since I was in high school that it really hard for me to tell the differences between high school and college. One of the key concepts that I discussed in this paper was risk taking and I said that I was kind of struggling with how to take risks and what exactly made something a risk. But I actually overcame this problem while actually revising this essay. In my rough draft as you can see on Weebly I didnt really answer questions 6 & 7 because the questions were kind of tough and forced me to take a risk. But once I revised my paper I succeeded and taking a risk by actually forcing myself to make connections throughout my paper. This also should growth in my writing because at the middle of the semester I was unable to find these connections and I used the critical thinking skills that I learned throughout

the class to help me. You can see these connections I made in the 6th paragraph of this paper. This paper helped me grow as mentor to younger kids because it forced me to think of advice that I would give to younger just entering college. I actually used this part of my essay when I sat down and had to talk to kids that I mentor in a Kappa league program that I am a part of. The most important advice that many of the kids took a lot from was Another piece of advice would be to learn how to navigate your way through distractions. In college there are many distractions and its very easy to get lost in them. You must never forget why you are here, and that is to get an education. It made me feel really good to give people the advice that I would have loved to have when I entered school. Blog- A personal website or web page, on which an individual records opinions, links to other sites on a regular basis. Blogging is something that I had no idea of what it really was at the beginning of the semester. But now that I know what it is and have participated in Blogging movement I have grown really fond of it. I really taught me how to organize my thoughts and actually get them down on to paper. I also realized that it can really be a great stress reliever to actually just sit down and just write and write about things that are bothering you or just write about random things that pop into your head. My favorite Blog post would probably be post number other than the fact of it being the most important one it really made think about what my dream actually is. I realized that actually really have it in my heart to travel the world and see new places which was something that I didnt know was a part of my dream until I wrote this post. I want to really travel the world and design roller coasters and different things all over the world and really make a difference in our society as a whole. Also this post really helped me a lot in the reflection of my literacy narrative that was at the beginning of this paper. It helped tell me how I incorporated language into my essay which was a key thing that I

wouldnt have remembered if I didnt go back through my blog posts. Blogging is something that I definitely might take up as a hobby now and thats just because of this class. I had rough drafts for all 3 major essays which was the genre study, literacy narrative, and the mid-term. Through these drafts you can see the improvement in my writing and how I actually followed the feedback that I received. In my literacy narrative I added a lot more sensory details and more descriptive words to really show how I was feeling in certain moments. An example of this is in my second paragraph I elaborated more on the intimidation that I was feeling after the coach made his announcement. I also talked more about the confidence that I was feeling when I got on the bus which was suggested by my peer editor. I tried to relate my nervousness to the audience by using this example. I was nervous equivalent to how nervous a college student would be if they walked into their final and didnt read there textbook or do any homework all semester. In my mid-term assignment the only thing that was missing from rough draft that I needed to fix was to address questions number 6 and 7. To actually answer these questions I had to use critical thinking, which is one of the key concepts that are on the syllabus. I had to use critical thinking to make connections throughout my whole essay. This wasnt easy because if it was I wouldnt have left it blank in my rough draft. Lastly in my genre study I included my actual high school writing that I had to analyze on my Weebly. One main thing I changed in part 2 of this assignment was adding an example where my implicit messages where applied. An example of this can be maybe when you have to make a speech in front of group of people for your job. In this situation you cannot let fear overcome you but you need to learn how to relax your mind which is a skill that I learned a lot about while doing swimming because its such an individual/mental sport.

I posted pictures of some main feedback points that really helped me with my literacy narrative. This feedback was really substantial to me revising my literacy narrative. One of my paragraphs was marked with an asterisk and it said that the paragraph felt very rushed. This helped me in learning how slow down my writing and adding more details to really keep my audiences attention. I listened to the feedback where it said to add something that I smelled, touched and felt. The smell of the strong chlorine was so strong that it almost began to make my nose run.; I jumped into to the pool and the water sent chills down my spine like no other, I thought I had just jumped into an ice bath! As I stated in the paragraph before this I elaborated more on the intimidation and confidence I was feeling that day and also tried to relate more to my audience by using the example of not being prepared for a final. In my 3rd reader response letter I learned a lot from the reading because it was about one of the worst problems that I have which is procrastination. I actually took some of my advice that I wrote about when writing this portfolio by starting my essay way before than the due date so I wouldnt have to be stressed the night before. Also it made me really think about what type of music helps me concentrate when writing. I also used my advice of taking breaks throughout writing to help slow down my brain from moving too fast for my fingers. My first RRL of the semester actually turned out to be a really insightful reading that helped me throughout the semester. One of the most important things that I took from this assignment was when the author said the first draft is the down draft -- you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft -- you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy. I ended up using this technique throughout the whole semester in writing all my papers. I would say the three drafts I have on my Weebly would be

my up drafts or the second part of this 3 step process. I think its really crazy that the easiest and shortest paper we had to write ended up being one of the most important for me this semester. As my wild card I chose to use a writers notebook response that we did on the first day of classes. I chose this because it shows my growth through the semester and some of the things that I mentioned I had a problem with are obviously no longer issues. I said that my writing weakness was my introductions, and you can obviously see throughout the semester how my introductions improved as we went along and now I have a much better understanding for how to really start a paper. In conclusion, I believe the grade that I deserve on this assignment would be an A. I would say that I completed this assignment to the best of my ability and made my Weebly as easy to navigate through as possible. I included my two key concepts throughout this paper and I believe I showed enough evidence to prove that I have grown from this semester of writing. My writing from this semester on will never be the same because of all the skills I acquired in this class. I hope you enjoyed reading my portfolio as much as I did writing it.