My name is Stephen Krakie and this is my VMI eportfolio.  The purpose of this portfolio is to display and discus the compositions I have completed this past semester in my ERH 101 class.  There are three compositions I will be discussing, a composition on my own experiences as a writer, a guide to a genre, and a discourse community ethnography.  I will be discussing how I progressed in writing skills and styles from the first assignment to the last, as well as discussing certain things I did well in each composition and things I need to improve upon.

But first, I want to talk about how the class as a whole has affected me and my writing not just in the class, but in all of my classes.  The first thing this class taught me is that the standards for papers in college is much greater than standards in high school.  I noticed early on in several classes that writing papers like I did in high school will not earn me the same grades.  A paper I would receive an A or B for in high school submitted here usually earned me a B or C. It showed me that I needed to apply different styles and strategies depending on what I was talking about and who my audience was, something I had never thought about before.

Thinking about my audience is one thing I learned from this course that has helped me in all of my classes this year.  Audience is something I never thought about before this class, because I didn’t affect my grades on high school papers.  The idea of tailoring what you say to fit your audience’s personalities, whether it’s a group of people or just on teacher, was completely new to me.  It seems like such a simple and obvious concept to me now but before now I never thought about it.  I realized if you don’t focus on audience then whoever is reading your composition may have practically no idea what you are trying to say. I applied this strategy several times in history class and it helped my grades dramatically on those papers.

Another thing I learned in this course was different strategies for invention of ideas, such as brainstorming and freewriting.  I already knew about brainstorming, but it never worked for me in high school.  But when I tried freewriting I found my ideas flowed out more organically the more I wrote, and in the end would end up with ideas that I would not have thought of otherwise.  Freewriting is basically just sitting down and writing non-stop for about five to ten minutes on the topic you are trying to write a composition on.  The thoughts don’t have to be particularly coherent or flow well, and don’t always have to do with the actual topic.  The point of it is to get what is going on in your head onto paper and allow those thoughts to build upon one another.  This strategy works very well for me with my compositions in this course and others.

The final main thing that this course has helped me improve upon is my writing process as a whole.  In high school, I could manage to write a whole paper start to finish in one night with little to no revision and proofreading.  As I said before, the standards in college are much higher than in high school, and more work is expected to be put in.  Before this class, I didn’t even know there was a difference between revision and proofreading.  But revision is changing the actual content of the paper, wording, sentence structure, idea placement, things of that sort.  While proofreading is minor revisions like spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes.  While I used to combine these both into the same action I now spend separate time on each.

As I look back on the three compositions I did this semester, I notice several things that I improved on in each paper as I progressed.  One of these is my introduction and conclusion paragraphs.  In my first paper, the portrait of a writer assignment, I had a solid introduction but not conclusion.  The main issue was that I did not connect the thesis in the introduction with the conclusion.  Therefore, in the second paper, conventions of a genre, I made sure to connect the thesis in the intro with the conclusion.  However, the thesis itself was not very clear and was still not completely effective.  But in the third and final composition, the discourse community ethnography, I was able to have an introduction that stated a clear thesis, was elaborated upon in the body, and brought to a solid close in the conclusion.

There are also areas I feel I did not improve in as much as I would have liked.  One of these is putting in seemingly impertinent information in my compositions.  An example of this is in my guide to a genre, I spend over a page talking about background history of the genre, and that’s after cutting out a huge chunk of what I had originally.  And then again in my Discourse Community Ethnography, I spend a huge amount of time talking about training, while in my opinion is an important part of the community, did not need the amount of detail I was going into.  And again, even after being cut down it is still almost too much information.  If I am knowledgeable about a topic I tend to like to tell all of my knowledge, even if it is impertinent to the composition, and is something I need to work on in the future.

With these in mind I hope you enjoy reading through my compositions for this past semester, as well as the reflections I have done on each one individually.  The reflections go into more detail about what I think went well and what did not in each composition.  To view the original compositions and their reflections, just click on the ERH 101 link which will take you to all of the compositions.