Welcome, this is my ePortfolio for English and Rhetoric 101. During this class I went on a journey, a journey to make myself a better writer. Each week lessons were brought upon the class to attack different parts of the writing process. The lessons focused on what one might think are the basics but in-turn are skills that are forgotten about or haven’t been fully developed. After participating in this class I witnessed how drastically my writing ability changed and developed for the better. Through the essays I wrote starting from writing about a pervious writing experience, to writing in or about a genre, and finally describing a discourse community I began to see my basic skills grow to levels I did not know they could. In this class I would say the biggest aspect I improved on was dealing with an audience.
Dealing with my first portfolio essay, which was writing about a past writing experience, I was coming into the whole writing process like I knew what I had to do. Well that was way off and I was thrown for a loop. I thought high school would prepare me for college essays; it turns out that high school does not. High school is easy compared to college; I didn’t have to prewrite, revise, or even write more then two drafts because I would get good grades on my papers no matter what. The teachers would not even correct me if I had simple errors on the paper. That being said I attacked this essay from a high school stand point; the vocab was sub-par, punctuation was weak, and typos happened more often then not. However, in my mind I thought it was a solid paper because how else was I supposed to know a college essay is a lot different. The paper was average, but what I developed going into my final draft was finding an audience to write and connect with and putting emotions toward my paper. I was never aware that every paper needed to have an audience to speak to and keep engaged; I always wrote just to appease myself not anyone else. As for emotion in a paper I lacked it completely. I did not add any words or situations to make the reader feel emotions. There is no reaction; my paper had no feeling as if one would be talking to a brain dead patient. My essays would just be words on paper and nothing behind them to make it drive a point. I changed that now due to this course, and in my final draft I added those basic skills of keeping an audience and building emotion. I kept the audience aware that my time writing this piece I was stressing out, noted by a passage from my first piece: “Nothing felt quite right now. I was starting to think ‘this is not going to work out one bit, I am going to fail.’ All these words on the page just do not make any sense.” For that section I wanted to make sure I roped in the audience to make them understand the troubles I was experiencing.
Audience is a big component dealing with my writing. When tackling my second portfolio essay not only did I apply the mechanics I just developed, but I also introduced new ones that I learned. In this essay I knew what I had to focus on; introduce the reader to an unfamiliar topic-the genre of metal-and keep the audience engaged at all times. I brought this mechanism over form the last essay I wrote because I always struggle with keeping my audience around. I wanted the reader to be on their feet, so I attempted to ask questions. To pin point the new developments I made during this piece were my connections of the conventions to the bands of metal and my grammar. Writing this piece I made it my goal to have supporting information such as connections to the bands and the genre in general that are easy to find and understand. For example, I talked abput how a band created a concept album and then further explained and defined what a concept album was. For those unfamiliar: “A concept album is an album in which every song connects to one another and describes an event that is taking place.” I had also gave a detail connection as to how church burnings began and continued to be a tradition of the metal genre. I mentioned:
“Church burnings and all these things are, of course, things that I support 100 percent and it should have been done much more and will be done much more in the future. We have to remove every trace from what Christianity and the Semitic roots have to offer this world.”
This excerpt relates to current events thus including the audience to participate. Even if the audience does not like what I am writing they still are talking about it. This paper I have to say was much cleaner when it comes down to errors in my writing. I worked hard in proofreading and I took my time making sure the words were correct and sentences made sense with one another. Even though my first essay was over and done with I still carried those mechanisms I developed and added more because a writer is never done developing, there is always room for improvement.
I feel like I am getting the hang of this developmental process of becoming a better writer. My improvements show how my audience hangs in longer in my writing pieces. On my third portfolio essay I was feeling pretty confident in all the mechanisms I had acquired from taking this class. There was not much I developed during this last essay because all other mechanisms I already learned I applied to this piece. But we all know there is always room to develop further, and for this piece I needed to develop cohesion. This paper was originally cut and paste with no fluidity or movement within the text. I threw ideas onto a page just thinking that it all made sense but it did not; it was never fluent. So, along with developing cohesion I also developed the use of transitions specifically between paragraphs. Knowing how to transition between paragraphs really makes the paper flow and I used this mechanism to do exactly that. Using transitions additionally makes the paper easy to understand and read. Having gotten to this third draft I needed to develop as a writer because if not, this essay would have had no structure or purpose at all. I can see in this last paper that my writing skills completely flipped around since day one, I am more on top of my game when it comes to proof reading, expanding on topics, describing, and other basic skills. The second paragraph of this essay I was able to address the reader with concerns he or she might have:
“I am putting my own experience into this experiment because I worked in this community long enough to understand how everything works, and I understand how we as employees communicate not only to other employees but also to customers.”
Adding the cohesive transitions and having this concern disclaimer allowed the audience to understand the concept easier and still stay connected to the piece. Fluidity from one paragraph to the other keeps the audience in check, and as far as skill development goes that was my goal for this third and final essay, keeping the audience in check.
For my time during this class I had learned a lot. I had soaked in an abundance of information relating to becoming a better writer. I picked up more information during these 4 weeks of class than I did in my 4 years of high school. This class introduced the basic writing techniques that normally go unnoticed and exemplified them to have them make an impact on my essays. My journey through this class was helpful; I will continue to develop by using these mechanisms for all my writing assignments because I have grown tremendously as a writer. I now see writing and pre writing and proofreading in a whole new perspective because my views have developed, and I now know that those processes are helpful to create a good piece of writing. When I put all the pieces I worked on in this course together I can see my skills gradually changing for the better and noticing my development. The one thing to make sure is having an audience, the audience drives the stories and if I make sure I keep the audience my skills will follow up to make sure my future papers are to their best abilities.