Welcome and thank you for visiting my Eportfolio on Writing and Rhetoric!

My name is Tyler Richards and I am currently enrolled as a freshman, or rat, at Virginia Military Institute in ERH-101. Within the menus of this Eportfolio you will see my development in writing as I create formal essays that deliver a clear purpose to a specific audience. Through trial and error within every one of the three major Portfolios, I developed as a writer which is evident in the final drafts of each assignment.  My writing is nowhere near perfection, yet by practicing within the curriculum I have progressed in key areas that have enhanced my writing immensely. I have come to see the value in thoroughly proofreading, creating multiple drafts, and finally accepting, or realizing, where I need to improve as a writer. My writing is always subject to peer-review and is reflected in each of the Portfolios. Through the course of the semester, my ability to connect to an audience has improved. I have learned to use concise sentences, transitions between paragraphs, and skills to summarize my thoughts to deliver a clear purpose in each of my essays.

From my very first essay in Portfolio #1 it is evident I still carried with me many of the bad habits adopted in high school. My writing was not horrible, yet I have always had a tendency to use, as my mother says, “majestic” sentence writing. When she says majestic, I believe she is trying to tell me that I am using far too many descriptive words in a sentence that seem to clutter, or over-explain the text. By peer-review and the guidance of my teacher, Mr. Hamilton, I realized that while wordy sentences may seem to portray intellectual thinking, they instead only hinder the flow of the essay. By writing multiple drafts and proofreading I have reduced and simplified my sentences which have made my ideas more concise and understandable. The precise sentences increased the flow between sentences, made the transitions between individual ideas and paragraphs fluid, and easier to connect.

The transitioning between paragraphs in my essays, and the thoughts they contribute to the purpose of the essay, have greatly improved in the course of the semester. In result, key points of the essays connect and contribute to the desired message I am trying to tell the audience. In the beginning of the semester, individually my ideas made valid points yet they failed to connect to lead the concluding purpose of the essay. This was evident in the first drafts of Portfolio #2, Writing in a genre, when I was able to list the conventions of the genre in my drafts, but not until after peer review I saw that I needed to properly transition, and connect them, in order to deliver the purpose of writing in the fantasy genre. The transitioning of paragraphs and ideas within my essays allowed me to lead the purpose of my writing to connect with the targeted audience of each of the Portfolios.

By refining my transitioning between ideas I’ve progressed in connecting with the audience with a clear purpose. The goals of each Portfolio to connect ideas and thoughts towards a clear purpose challenged my ability in writing. In Portfolio #3 when I wrote about the discourse community of Cross Country teams I had particular trouble in finding a way to connect the conventions of the community to lead to a central purpose. I progressed in that I learned to write my ideas out before beginning to draft in order find a way to combine my individual thoughts to lead to the main idea of the essay.  By completing the assignments with this new strategy in mind I changed the way I approached my organization of essays and have developed to deliver a clear purpose to a targeted audience.

A trait that I have found in humans is the fear of being wrong. I too had this fear before entering ERH-101 which may be the reason I rarely re-read my work in fear of realizing that it was wrong. As a writer, the class has allowed me to overcome my fear of self-criticism as well as accept peer review to enhance the quality of my essays. By overcoming my fear, I was able to improve my writing by using concise sentences, transitions between paragraphs, and in result deliver a clear purpose to the audience. While these are the key areas in which my writing has changed I feel the greatest thing I can take away from the course is my ability to accept my own writing. By having to do multiple drafts and receive peer review I adapted to be comfortable with my own writing willingness to alter it between drafts. This has been my key development not only as a writer but in some ways as a person. In the end this allowed my writing to change by allowing me to see where I needed to improve in the areas listed above, yet also gave me the confidence I needed as a writer to get frequent scrutiny to make my writing the best that it can be.