Final Reflection

Dear Professor Campbell,

First I would like to say it has been a fantastic semester having you as my writing

professor. The relaxed classroom environment that was established every class period gave me,

and Im sure many of my classmates, a special motivation to learn and produce quality work. It

was quite the opposite experience from my other 5 classes this semester because I did not feel

pressured by grades, deadlines, and extreme workload. I felt that the class was very well

balanced and provided an even distribution of work from week to week. Thank you.

I am proud of what I have put together in this E-Portfolio. One thing I have struggled

with for many years is my habit to procrastinate large and small assignments, however, I am

satisfied that I chose to break that tradition for this assignment. One of my main goals for my

portfolio was to have a main theme something that ties everything together in a visual sense.

When Studio 2 was assigned and I was tasked with looking at example portfolios from previous

years, one thing stood out to me: the few, very attractive and high-quality portfolios. What did

the good portfolios have that made them stand out? In my daybook reflections for Studio 2, the

answer laid in plain site (ha get it): It was theme; colors, pictures, and most importantly, the

quality of content written on top of these different backgrounds that made a more presentable

portfolio. As you can see, I incorporated just that. For example, my placement of pictures is

unchanging, my fonts and word format are incredibly predictable (yet, unique), and the word

length for each reflection is suitable to the weight of the assignment.

Now lets start from the beginning. For my first assignment, Letter to my Professor, I was

surprisingly excited well as excited as one can be when writing a detailed letter for school.
Like most people, I enjoyed talking about myself, my family, and what I plan for my future.

Another reason for my eagerness in this assignment was because I was excited for another

semester of school, though, I do not relate to any of those feelings now that I have experienced

the dreaded Extended Inquiry Project.

Creating my first draft of my EIP could not have been any more demoralizing. Though I

could research and learn about net neutrality to my hearts content, the process of defining and

explaining this complex topic using analogies was awful. See, it is one thing to understand what

net neutrality is, but attempting to teach what it is and define it in a less complex way is an

excruciating process even when there was a deep interest. Once I pushed through it and got the

crappy, unorganized words on paper I finally understood what needed to be done to finalize it.

This was all thanks to peer review.

The first time taking advantage of peer review was during the topic proposal assignment,

where I was paired with Olivia, Rebecca, and Sarang. The comments I received from them were

extremely helpful and I was glad to put in their group. Unlike my first EIP draft, I enjoyed

writing the topic proposal for net neutrality. This was because the topic proposal didnt ask to

explain net neutrality in detail, and it mainly focused on my initial interest instead. Also, I did not

find it extremely challenging to elaborate on why net neutrality matters, so I didnt have to spend

much time on the assignment.

I was feeling good about UWRT during this time... until canvas sent me a deadline to the

annotated bibliography. As you can see in my portfolio, I was not very fond of this assignment.

The most difficult part was certainly the MLA formatting. Even in my freshman year of high

school MLA was tedious work apparently not much has changed since then. I must have read

the MLA 8 website at-least five more times than I needed. I was determined to create beautiful
MLA citations, even if that meant deciphering every punctuation mark on that website.

Surprisingly, summarizing the five articles in my bibliography was a breeze. My peer group was

writing full pages worth of summaries for their articles and I was just sitting back, knowing that

my half-page summaries held enough information to get the point across. Its not too difficult for

me to read an article and identify its main points and how it contributes to my EIP.

Following my annotated bibliography, I was already halfway done with all of the studios

for the semester. The prompts for each studio did get more challenging as the semester went on,

but overall, they were simplistic and did not take a huge amount of time to complete. The first

studio, SLO translation, was well-placed and afterwards I could clearly identify the five main

learning components we would cover. For example, my ability to reflect on UWRT through this

letter is strengthened by my initial interpreting of critical reflection. I feel that the studios mostly

improved upon my ability to comprehend advanced writing techniques and bring me to a level

that was more suitable to college writing. The Writers Moves studio, in particular, reinforced my

argumentative writing style which was the perfect exercise before editing my final EIP draft.

I was very organized in my approach to editing my final EIP draft. I first opened all of the

peer reviewed documents, including your comments, then I opened up the main sources to my

research and got to work. I took multiple steps to ensure that my definitions were correct and

relatively understandable. I still found it quite difficult to tie everything together, but I am

pleased with where I left it. One thing I struggled with the most while writing the EIP final was

knowing where to break my paragraphs and make my assertions. Other than that, I feel that my

sources and commentary came together nicely.

The E-Portfolio was my favorite assignment of all, because it ties everything together and

I was able to put my own unique spin on it. I based this entire thing on my thoughts and feelings
for UWRT (though I know that was the main part of the prompt). It was easy for me to recall

things I liked, or didnt like, things I could improve on, and things I learned. I do not think I need

to change the composition here, and I am beyond excited to have it published the way it is.

Lastly, I would like to comment on my experience with all of the informal writing we did

this semester. I feel 50/50. The freewriting was enjoyable at times, and felt like busy work at

other times. My favorite prompts for freewriting were the ones that had us talk about our

feelings, while my least favorite were analytical prompts. It takes a lot of brain power to write

analytically at 9:30 AM as fast as I can. For the most part, I did not look forward to writing

blogs, and I made sure I put that in my portfolio. I didnt feel like myself when writing them. I

felt somewhat restricted in my thoughts because these posts end up online, whereas my

freewriting is kept safe in a composition notebook.

That is all I have to say about UWRT 1104. I hope that what I have said here will help

you better the course curriculum in the future. I can honestly say that this was my second most

enjoyable class of the semester, but you were my favorite professor of the year.

Thanks again Mr. Campbell.

Sincerely,

Andrew Lackey