Eric Hodges Ms.

Ingram English 1101 11/1/2013 Portfolio Essay The literacy narrative taught me really how to write something other than a five paragraph essay. It also taught me that I can actually enjoy writing if it is something that I enjoy to write about. I liked writing this paper because I felt like I got more freedom with the paper than I had gotten with any paper that I had done in the past. Ill admit that the first draft I had no idea what I was doing at the time. I just wrote what came to my mind then. I tried too much to make it sound refined and professional. After the first peer workshop I learned that sounding like I had nice refined and perfect paper was not what the paper was supposed to be like. I also learned that I needed to go back and add a lot more sensory detail. This is something that I struggled with over my next two drafts of the paper. This paper was the probably the biggest learning experience for me in the entire course. It may sound cheesy but the paper let me discover myself as writer. It let me know that I was capable of writing something other than a dreaded five paragraph essay or the awful annotated bibliography that I had to do for my senior year English class. The genre analysis however was different for me. It was a definitely a much more difficult assignment for me. On the first draft I had absolutely no idea what so ever as to what I was I was doing. I just wrote anything that came to me about my high school annotated bibliography and hoped that it made some kind of sense. Which looking back at that first draft it didnt make sense at all. I realize that now what it was lacking is a larger description of the

annotated bibliography that I was talking about and it lacked sensory detail. I needed to quote from the assignment a lot more, which was hard for me to do the first time because I didnt have the annotated bibliography in front of me when I was doing the assignment. I also didnt know until Ms. Ingram pointed it out to me that annotated bibliographies differ from teacher to teacher and in fact almost no teacher does them the same way. Two key concepts that I engaged with in the course are risk taking and providing and receiving feedback. I engaged with risk taking because as I said before the literacy narrative was unlike anything that I had done in the past with my writing. What I was thinking as I was doing the paper was wait wait. Am I actually enjoying writing something in my life? Is this possible? For me it was a stretch to write something that was not perfectly structured. It was strange for me to actually get the chance to structure the paper myself and not have someone else making me structure the paper in a specific way. The other key concept that I identified with was providing and receiving feedback. The first time that we had a peer workshop for our literacy narrative I had no idea how to provide someone with feedback. It was something that I had never done before and had no idea how to go about doing it. Also I am an incredibly shy person so speaking out about the good parts and the flaws of someones paper was hard for me. Another thing is for me unless something is obviously bad to me it sounds perfect the first time that I hear it. As far as receiving feedback I dont think that I could have ever made it through this class without having some kind of feedback on my writing pieces. The first workshop helped realize that I needed to add a lot more sensory detail to my literacy narrative. The first draft of my genre analysis I knew was bad, no more like horrible. I found out that going on a mini vacation to Memphis for a race was a bad

idea. Even with all of that Ms. Ingram was still nice and positive with her feedback of my paper. It really helped me re-write the paper after that. The first part of my e-portfolio is the blog post. For the blog post assignments we had to respond to questions that Ms. Ingram posted on her own Weebly site. When we first did these assignments I did them as just that, assignments. I didnt really understand the concept of freedom with an assignment, but I still completed the assignments. I organized them as the first tab because they were the first of our assignments that we had to complete on Weebly. The first major assignment in this course that we did was my favorite out of all of the assignments that we did, it was the Literacy Narrative. This assignment was my favorite because of how much freedom I was given in writing the assignment. I was never before given so much freedom in writing a paper. Because of this at first I had no idea what to do. I learned from this assignment how to write a paper that is different from the modular waste of time that I had to do in high school. I learned that not everything in my paper had to sound perfect and intelligent. The biggest thing that I learned from the assignment was how to refine a paper. This something as well that I had never done before. In fact in the past I had never even got the chance to refine one of my papers. In high school all of my papers were one try sit down and do it all at once with no help. This is the third tab on my e-portfolio. This is the third tab for one big and pretty obvious reason it was the first thing that I went back and refined when I started to work on my portfolio. For this tab I included my third draft of my paper as a process work. When I went back to re-do this assignment I did something a little different than what I thought I was going to do. Instead of just reopening the file and making the changes where they needed to be. I got out the final draft that we turned and copied the paper. Even though I copied the paper if read both of them you will see major differences in the material. I put a lot more sensory detail in my most recent draft

and to me it seems to read a lot better. For example when I wrote the third draft of my portfolio essay I said I remember my first day of English four and how I was praying that for some divine reason that the school board or the state had decided to scrap the entire idea of a senior project. When I went back to change the literacy narrative I changed it to sound more interesting and appealing to read. I changed it by adding more sensory detail and adjectives. For example The first day of my English class I felt nervous for some reason that I couldnt explain. This caused a sense of anxiety to come over me for some unexplainable reason. Before the class started I sat in my, for some odd reason already warm seat, and silently prayed to myself that for divine reason the school board or the even had decided to scrap the entire idea of a senior project. You can see as read the two of these the second one has more details and emotions to it. Some of the details that I added to it have nothing to do with what I was talking about but they help build the environment and emotion of the scene , which I think is more of what the assignment was meant to be about. The second major assignment that we completed in this course was the midterm assignment. Instead of this being some big paper or a major test, like what I did in the rest of my classes, it was a blog post that we completed on Weebly. The assignment consisted of me answering seven different questions with a minimum of at least three hundred words per answer. This assignment sounded completely too easy when I read the directions. It turned out that the questions would require a deeper level of thought out of me for each question. I found myself going over the three hundred word minimum more and more for the ones that require deeper level of thought. I put this as the second tab on Weebly because it was the second major thing that we had to put onto Weebly. There is no process work to this assignment because this is not

an assignment that we had to make drafts for it was more of just answering the questions in a meaningful way. The next major assignment that we had to was the Genre Analysis. This was definitely the most difficult for me. I had no idea what to write about for my genre analysis. From this assignment I learned a few things from it. One, I learned to go out of town on vacation when a major assignment is due. If I ever do that again I learned that I need to complete the assignment before I ever leave to go because there are just way too many distractions wherever I go to. I also learned that quoting in an assignment like this one is absolutely crucial to the paper not only sounding good but also to the paper making sense in the first place. One top of this assignment being difficult for me I did not enjoy writing it like I did writing the literacy narrative. But instead of just complaining about the assignment any further it taught me something that I dont think it was meant to. It taught me that in order to have a proficient product you need to put serious work into the assignment. For the genre analysis I added what I needed to do in the first place I added more quotes. For example when I first completed the final draft of the assignment I had no quotes in my first paragraph. When I went back to redo the assignment I added I needed to look for information such as in the past few years the furniture manufacturing process has started to leave out of China, in fact a lot of the manufacturing process is starting to be done back in the United States. I added this as well as more what I thought when I read these facts. I explained what I thought of this with Reading that the manufacturing process is starting to make a move back to the United States is promising to me as I think that this is a lot of what was wrong with Americas economy and its dependents on other nations. Adding these quotes and more I think helped make the paper better and much more what Ms. Ingram wanted out of me in the first place.

Another part of my e-portfolio is the reader response letters. The reader response letters gave us a chance to read a passage and have deep enough understanding to respond in an intellectual way. A lot of these I will admit I did the clich for this assignment, I agree with such and such, or I disagree with this point. I basically did that until I got at least a page out of it. Toward the end of the course I began to read the passages in more detail and began to give, in my opinion, much better and deeper responses. I think that the more meaningful responses that actually show that I took the time to actually comprehend the reading is more of what Ms. Ingram was looking for anyway. For one of the feedback article I used Ms. Ingrams notepad feedback that she made in her office when I read the first draft of my portfolio essay to her. My three process works are from drafts of the literacy narrative and genre analysis. They are either under the writing artifacts tab or the tabs with the assignment that they coincide with. One of the writers notebook artifacts that I used was my third reader response letters. It is under the writing artifacts tab. Even though this is not one of my best reader response letters I still decided to include it anyway. I think that if you compare that to my wild card piece which is the Henry Doss you will see how much more work that I started to put into the assignments. Lastly, the other feedback artifact is under my literacy narrative tab. It is from the final draft of the paper that we turned in. Finally the grade to finish things off, what grade do I deserve? I think that I deserve an A I put a lot of work into the e-portfolio and when I went back and re-wrote my drafts of my other papers I did not just add little things here and there. I completely rewrote and reworked them as a whole. I showed that I grew as a writer over the semester. I gave plenty off examples and quotes to show that I did indeed grow as writer this semester. I think that the amount of work that I put

into this assignment I would say rivaled that off the amount of work that I put into my senior project. I hope that you agree with these things and agree with the grade that I think I deserve.