Alex Violette

Ms. Ingram
UWRT 1101
November 27, 2014

Final Portfolio Essay

Welcome to my weebly page! Before I get started, I would just like to say that my
portfolio is organized in no particular order. After reading this introduction, feel free to explore
this page however you would like. For about a week, I couldnt decide on how I wanted to
organize my page. I didnt want the reader to have to go in any order, or for one page to not
make sense if you didnt read another one. To do this, I separated my page into four different
tabs: Home, Blog, Major Papers, and Extras. Each one is independent of the others. The titles
below are all links that will take you to that specific page of my site. In order to properly explain
all of the pieces I have written in this class, I will break down each page and each articles
significance.

Home Tab
The first and easiest to explain is the Home tab. This is the first page you see when you
will come to my portfolio and is definitely the simplest one. It only contains my Final Portfolio
Essay, which is what you are currently reading, and a picture of me skateboarding from last fall,
2013. This Final Portfolio Essay is both a way to introduce you to my page and to explain the
reasoning behind my choices throughout this class. I decided to add this picture of myself on the
home page because I feel that a picture is the best way for the reader to get an idea of who the
author is. I also chose this picture over a simple picture of my face because in order for the

reader to get an idea of who I am, they must understand that I am not just some anonymous
author with arbitrary ideas and opinions; I am a skateboarder. All of my thoughts are based on
my long history of skateboarding.

Blog Tab
Going from left to right, you will end up on the Blog tab next. This page features six blog
posts that I wrote during the course of this class and a midterm. The blog posts usually involved
responding to an article or responding to an in class activity such as work shopping. At the
beginning I thought it was a simple way to have us write more often and in a different style than
writing an essay. However, now, looking back at them I see how they actually helped me with
my writing. It may have been in a different way than others, but I saw these blog posts as not
only a way to express an opinion on something but a little way to get out the non formal, almost
argumentative writing I had building up in my head.

Major Papers
The third tab out of four, Major Papers, contains just what you would expect: the major
papers. The two essays on this page are my Literacy Narrative (Final Presentation) and my
Portrait of a Writer essay (Push Writing). After each essay, there is a slideshow with the artifacts
I chose that are related to that essay. I will first talk about Final Presentation, my Literacy
Narrative.

Final Presentation
This essay was the first that we wrote while in this class. I think this was the biggest
breakthrough that I experienced. It was the first step from a typical high school, five paragraph
essay to an almost anything goes type of writing that I actually really enjoy. I feel that our class

was very similar to that of Donald A. McAndrews and how he describes it in his essay This
Isnt What We Did in High School saying In our class, the form of writing and its length are
decided by the writer. We were never told to write any assignment in a specific form; for this
assignment we were simply told to write an essay or narrative about our literacy development.

After thirteen years of formal education and ten years of skateboarding, I would
consider myself literate in these fields. The neat thing about literacy that has always
intrigued me is that even when you qualify as being literate whether on your own
standards or somebody elses, you can always learn something new.
This quote is from the last paragraph of my first draft. I think that this is a clear example
of the different tone that I wrote each version of this assignment in. Rather than explaining my
point through telling a story, I explained my point in an essay with a real life connection:
skateboarding. In my second and all subsequent drafts, I wrote a story and sprinkled in the same
ideas. The ultimate decision to expand on the narrative, however, was that I had never written a
nonfictional story so I viewed it as a perfect opportunity to experiment. Before I began, it was
really tough trying to pinpoint in on about an hour of time and write five pages about it. But as
soon as I began, it was hard to try to prevent myself from writing ten pages. When I began
writing and remembering more and more details, it became easier and easier to continue. This
essay allowed me to experiment with another genre and I feel more confident in my ability to
write a narrative.

Artifacts for Final Presentation

The first slideshow was actually the final touch to my portfolio. After I added pictures to
my Portrait of a Writer essay, I decided to continue that trend so I called my mom and asked her

to take a few pictures of my house that this essay is based around. There are a total of five
pictures in this slideshow, all of which are different views of my 3-D house that I completely
designed top to bottom. I thought that after reading this essay, it might be helpful to visualize the
entire event if you had a picture of the house I was presenting. Directly below the pictures of my
model house are two artifacts that I chose that are related to my Literacy Narrative that really
depict the change in direction between my first draft and later drafts. The first image is of my
brainstorming page I created in preparation for my first draft. The ideas I came up with that are
on this page were not openly apparent in my final draft. When you go to the next picture, you
can see that I switched speeds and chose to talk about my architecture presentation. I chose to
add these two together because you can actually see the difference of ideas I experienced when
initially composing this essay. I dont think I would have included either if I had to choose
between one or the other.

Push Writing
The next piece of writing you will find on this tab is Portrait of a Writer - Push Writing.
This is the second of the major essays and possibly my favorite piece I have ever written. Similar
to the first draft of my Literacy Narrative, I wasnt one hundred percent content with my first
draft of this essay. Except it was a lot worse with this one. I procrastinated until the night before
and wrote a quick essay in an hour. To quote myself in a free writing warm up that also happens
to be one of my chosen artifacts, So far it sucks. I dont like anything about it. That pretty
much sums it up. Not wanting to do the same thing going into draft two, I started well ahead of
time. I decided to try out Nathan Timms trick to prevent procrastination. He says to give
yourself an hour to complete your assignment, but do it a week in advance. With this strategy in

mind, I began to think about how I wanted to write this new and improved essay. We were
encouraged to be adventurous and experiment with this draft, so I took that to an extreme. As
usual, it took a little bit to get started. Not as usual, once I began, I still took a long time to finish
a paragraph. Normally I would give up and take the easier route, but I really wanted to write this
essay as far out there as I could. For one, I said multiple different times how much I appreciated
different and abstract, creative ideas: Skateboarding, writing, whatever the case. Creativity is
something that I always admire in my own work and others. In order to exemplify this
admiration of mine, I had to make this essay as abstract as possible while still fulfilling the
requirements of the prompt.
Another thing I did, getting the idea from Ms. Ingram, was add pictures directly into the
essay. On a draft revision she wrote I wonder if you could weave in some pictures of you
skateboarding? Would that be helpful and/or interesting for your readers? To do this, I didnt
want to add just any old random pictures. I wanted them to be relevant to the essay. The picture
on the final page is the easiest to explain so Ill start there. This is a close up picture of me
pushing. Going along with the title, Push Writing, the main theme of this entire essay was to
talk about my writing and doing things differently, including the format of this essay. The picture
on the second page is a picture of me doing a nose grind on a street barrier. This picture might
also not be as obvious in its reasoning for being in this essay. Besides it being a picture of me
skateboarding, it is a picture of me skating something that any normal person would not even
take a second glance at. However, to me, I see millions of possibilities and countless ideas come
to mind on how I could use it while skateboarding. Another little back story behind this photo
that will also help clarify its reason to be included, was that to actually do this and roll away

took me a long time. The more I tried to do it, the more I wanted to do it. The paragraph before
this picture is about bad warm ups. To do this trick, I experienced many bad warm ups and
many bad falls. About halfway through this bad warm up paragraph, I wrote something that
goes along with this; If I am taking a longer time to warm up, I know it will not be a good day. I
will spend most of my time trying something that results in falling.

Artifacts for Push Writing

The first artifact, which take up the first three slides, is the last draft before I wrote my
final draft. I decided to add this because it shows you the feedback I received. As you can see in
the final draft, I actually used most of the feedback to improve my paper. The piece of feedback
that made me decide to include this is on the very last page at the bottom, saying it might be
useful to add pictures to give the reader a better visual. Prior to this comment, I had this idea but
wasnt sure how to go about completing it, so I wasnt going to try it. After this is when I was
convinced to try it. I really like the way it came out. Its kind of surprising how effective a
picture can be in conveying a message, and even to me, this picture adds something to this piece.
The next artifact was from an in-class assignment we did one day instead of a
conventional workshop. Ill admit when I first read the assignment, I was kind of bummed about
it. It sounded a little difficult and I didnt see how it could be helpful. This workshop substitute,
Side-shadowing, worked by swapping papers with our group members, reading through once,
and then writing a new introduction and conclusion for the other person. At first, I thought
Really? How will rewriting someone elses introduction and conclusion help me with my own
essay? I was completely wrong. Im not sure that I helped my partner, Grayson Collins, too
much but he definitely helped me. I liked the conclusion he wrote for my essay so much that I

deleted my whole version and wrote a new one very similar to his. My initial conclusion, which
Im kind of embarrassed about now, was only one short set of sentences. Who am I, the writer?
A skateboarder. A creator. An artist. Yep. Thats it. My entire conclusion. What was I thinking?
Oh well, Grayson came to the rescue. I ended up writing a longer conclusion that I believe does a
better job at closing out this piece.
Next in this slideshow, is another in-class assignment. This one, however, was not about
someone elses paper. The idea was to write down our plans for revision for the next draft which
would be my third. I chose to add this because I actually made an appointment and met with Ms.
Ingram because I was not sure that my essay was clear. It made sense to me, but I had a gut
feeling that to literally anybody else, it would seem like it was written in some made up
language. I wrote this in a strange, experimental format and I could see people getting easily
confused. At this point in my essay development, I had all of the information I was going to
include so I just wanted to focus on making it easy to read. After my appointment with Ms.
Ingram, she reassured me that it was not confusing and she understood all of the ideas I was
trying to convey.
The second to last in the slideshow, is my prewriting stage for this essay. I wanted to
show that my brainstorming process is usually not neat and is mostly chicken scratch. I started
by writing out each question and leaving some space between each one. This was the
brainstorming for my first draft so it is not one hundred percent the same as what I actually wrote
in my final draft but they are extremely close. I included this because this is typically how I will
begin to write an essay and it will give the reader an idea of how I go about getting from the first
draft to the final draft.

Last but not least really applies to this final artifact. This was a free writing assignment
from the early stages of writing this essay. When I wrote this, I hadnt even started my second
draft yet. The main reason I chose to add this assignment was to show the initial point when I
had the idea of connecting the questions to skateboarding floating around my head. I wanted to
somehow connect it to skateboarding but I could not figure out how to do so. Believe it or not,
this was only a few hours before I came up with the idea of how I wanted to connect the two.

Extras
I added this page because there were a few artifacts that I chose that did not directly
relate to any of the essays, but rather my writing in general. The perfect e-portfolio that I had in
mind prior to completing it was to have no stray artifacts. I wanted to choose only artifacts that
would have some direct effect on an essay. I realized while creating the Major Essays page that I
would not be able to tie them all in to one specific essay.
The two pictures at the very top are eight years apart. The picture on the left is from
2006, which is only a few years after I began skating. The picture on the right is from this year,
2014. I chose to add these together because the whole point of this webpage is to show my
improvement over the time of this class, and the pictures show my improvement in a subject non
school related. This is another subliminal way that I used to hint at improvement over time.

Helpful Warm Ups

This slideshow consists of two different warm ups, one about comma splices, run ons,
and FANBOYS and the other about colons and semicolons. The first (comma splices, run ons,
and FANBOYS) is written in probably the worst hand writing ever. As long as I can still read it a
week later then I am content. There isnt really much to what is actually written down, but rather

what was said that I didnt write down. Basically what my notes are trying to tell you is that a
comma splice is when a comma is put between two independent clauses. We learned that there
are a few different ways to correct these splices and run ons. The first and easiest is to just put a
period between the two sentences. The second was to use FANBOYS (For And Nor But Or Yet
So). I dont usually intend on using fanboys when fixing a sentence; it usually just comes
naturally that I use them. The final correction method, which is probably the one I used the most,
is to add a colon or semicolon. This was a very big weak spot for me when I began this class. My
high school English teachers werent too thorough with teaching grammar. However, after one
warm up with two short examples I began to get the hang of using them. I instantly began trying
to use them in my essays, correcting sentences that had comma splices.
I think of skateboarding as a form of art. There are no rules, very few limits, and you
can never master it.
I think of skateboarding as a form of art: there are no rules, very few limits, and you can
never master it.
The first quote is from the second draft of my Portrait of a Writer essay and the second is
from my final draft. As you can see, all I did was replace the period with a colon. Even though it
was just that one little change of punctuation, I think the version from my final draft sounds
much better when you are reading it. The second sentence enhances the the first one when they
are combined like this.

Reader Response Letter #4

This title is very self explanatory. This is my reader response letter #4. I chose to add this
because it was one of the reader responses that was most helpful to me. Some of the tips were
new to me but others were things I already did but did not know why or even know I did that.

The best tip that I was actually encouraged to pursue based on this reading was to talk to your
professors if you have questions or concerns. During draft two of Push Writing, I was worried
that what I was trying to say wasnt being read the same way. I really wanted to do a good job
writing this essay because it was about something very important to me, skateboarding, and I
wanted it to be perfect. To ease these worries, I made an appointment with Ms. Ingram to go over
my essay. She gave me some good feedback that helped me get through draft three and my final
draft and I ended up with an essay I was proud of. Im not sure that I would have made these
same decisions had I not read this chapter written by Dan Melzer. One of my favorite lines from
this semester is from his essay: Students who pick topics that fascinate them, topics that they
really want to know more about, almost always write better essays than students who rely on the
same old topics. This quote was very true while I was writing Push Writing. I was writing
about something that I love and have loved since I was nine years old. I wanted to make sure
everything was perfect.
_________________________________________________________________

Key Concepts
Throughout this course, I have gotten out of my comfort zone in writing, improved my
writing process, and worked on critical thinking. Both of the major essays I wrote were nothing
like anything I have written before. At the beginning of the year, five pages sounded like a death
sentence. Here I am now, currently writing page eleven of this essay and I have been holding
back so it doesnt get too long. If I was given this assignment at the beginning of the year I
probably would have dropped out of college. I said I have improved my writing process, but
really all I did was create one. I used to just start; no brainstorming or anything. Now, I like to

write down some ideas and organize them before I start writing. It usually pays off. It will be
easier to write and I will finish earlier than if I did not brainstorm. Finally, critical thinking. I
took critical thinking to an extreme while writing Push Writing. I had to really try to look at it
from the perspective of someone who knows nothing about skateboarding, which is pretty
difficult for me, so that it would make sense whether you knew nothing or everything. There
were a few times that I changed sentences because I would write them and then realize that no
one probably knows what it means unless you skateboard.

My Grade
I believe that I earned an A for this course. I have done all of the assignments on time,
tried to write every paper better than the last, and my e-portfolio is complete along with a
complete Final Portfolio Essay. Trying to start my college years off on the right foot, I tried my
hardest to not have any late work at all in any class. At times this was difficult but I always
persevered and finished my work. With every major paper and even minor assignments, I have
never slacked and did something just because we had too. I chose to write about subjects I
enjoyed so I was even more motivated to write a better essay. Including this Final Portfolio
Essay, I have tried to make every essay better than the last and I believe I have done just that. As
for my e-portfolio, I have all of the artifacts required and I have explained them all in the Final
Portfolio essay. Like I said in my midterm, I am prepared to do all that I can to receive an
exemplary grade in this class, and I believe that I did all that I could and that is why I deserve
an exemplary grade in this course. Having almost finished this essay, I am starting to think
similar to Joe Quatrone: Hmm. Thats not so bad. I guess Im not that bad a writer. I guess I
have a lot to learn, too, though.