My Portfolio: Improving My Writing Skills

I would like to take this opportunity to express my thoughts, observations, and reflections on the academic writing that was presented within the Capella University writing course. The enclosed portfolio will provide additional detail to what I have learned throughout this course, and showcase my strengths and weaknesses.

As I reflect at the end of this semester on my work in my English 101 class, I am able to already see how much I have improved as a writer. This class has taught me many things and helped me grow and develop my skills as a writer. It has taught me how to use clear concrete details in my writings. I engaged in several assignments and peer workshop during this semester, and the feedback that I received from my professor and peers has helped me a lot.

Over the course of the semester, my main goal was to become a more precise writer and develop my identity as a writer. According too, the Portfolio Letter assignment sheet, becoming a better writer consists of precise planning, draft and revising. It also includes understanding a variety of academic genres by examining the basic characteristics that defines each type. In order too efficiently meet my goal of becoming a better writer, it was very important to have my work evaluated by others and myself as well. The use of rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking, reading and writing all are the important aspects in this course. All of which helped tremendously with becoming a more precise writer and developing my identity as a writer.

In my spring semester of English 1301, I was required to view reading and writing in a drastically new way. This steep learning curve highlighted my weaknesses as a writer and textual analyst. I have learned a great deal in my time as an English student, however I have much to learn about professional and colligate writing.

reflecting on my progress thus far in this course, I have not only become cognizant of my writing skills and habits, but improvements I need to make to become a better writer. Although writing has never been one of my strong suits, I have learned valuable writing skills and strategies that are applicable to both the professional and academic field.

We have reached the end of the semester unconsciously. During this semester, we’ve practiced and improved our writing by outlining, composing, editing, and revising. Throughout the process, I discovered my strengths and weaknesses, meanwhile, I tried hard to refine my writing skills.

I am writing this Rhetorical Reflection Memo to reflect on my experiences, readings, and works and examine how my skills have developed from past to present and how to further improve them in the future. Over the course of the term there have been four papers (this being the fifth) that have made me aware of both my strengths and weaknesses in writing: “Rhetorical Analysis”, “Analytic Summary”, “Literacy Narrative”, and “Summary Response”. I struggled the most writing the “Summary Response”, and had the most ease writing the “Literacy Narrative”, but with each paper I experienced some kind of difficulty that helped me learn about my own capabilities.

In this portfolio, I have included my collection of assignments to showcase my writing abilities and how my writing skills have grown over the course of this semester. My best assignment is the Discipline Investigation and my second best is the Rhetorical Analysis. Although the RA was my second best assignment, I was able to learn valuable skills by deconstructing an article and identifying rhetorical appeals and strategies to find the author’s main purpose.

In my past years of writing I have seen myself develop into a well disciplined and patient writer. However, I have seen myself significantly improve and mature as a writer over the past few months more than I have in the past four years. I view writing as an open doorway full of ideas, feelings, and thoughts weaved together simply for creating a masterpiece. Before entering college English 1010, high school students are conditioned to write required papers and assignments without having the ability to “put you’re your own opinions and feelings in a paper.” Fortuantly,I have been given the opportunity at The University of Memphis to express myself in writing

My writing process has changed tremendously over the course of this class. I feel more accomplished, confident and I feel sometimes that my ideas and thoughts just come in to my mind out of nowhere and I start writing about anything now. I pay attention to my punctuation and grammar more as I have polished them more now, not only when I write but then others write as well. I am constantly looking for errors and I highly think this is helping me a lot in my career. The comments from my instructor, the online material, my research, the online writing center and comments from other students in the discussion boards have helped me so much to improve my writing skills.

Preparation is the key to successfully navigating any writing assignment. Thus far, I have found this class to be beneficial in this regard. To start, the readings that we have discussed have been very stimulating from a creative standpoint. This is important since imagination is necessary to properly convey one’s thoughts and feelings. Likewise, the responses and subsequent class discussions have further served to promote abstract and analytical thinking. Also, by considering the opinions of others, it has further enabled me to examine and refine my own beliefs. The summary assignment made for good practice at interpreting information and then relating that material to others. Building upon that was the synthesis essay, which was a useful exercise in consolidating multiple sources into one complete and coherent article. Finally, the Blackfish documentary served to illustrate what can be achieved when one utilizes all of the aforementioned skills in their work (Blackfish). Altogether, I believe that I am well equipped for my research paper.

Writing essays and other types of posts has always been difficult for me. But, throughout this composition class, I have learned many interesting and new things about the different types of writing styles. When starting this class, I considered myself to be an average writer with run-of-the-mill vocabulary, ordinary sentence structure and typical finished products. This class has helped me greatly improve my writing skills in a variety of ways. I have learned multiple things by taking this class, such as new ways to approach writing and that there is much that I still need to learn about composition.

Before taking writing skills two I 've had a positive mindset towards writing because I see it as a way to express my thoughts. For example, whenever I feel a bit melancholy writing a short story or just free writing always makes me feel a bit better. On the other hand, I don’t believe I’m the best writer because like every other student I make mistakes in my writing. Although, I don’t take the editing negatively I always look back at my past essay and try to reflect on them to see how I can always improve my writing skills. Overall, I have a pretty good mindset towards writing even though I have my mistakes I know if I study harder I can become a better writer over time.

Each essay I wrote took me several time to write, several drafts which show that I have improve every time I do the drafts to write a perfect masterpiece. I learned a lot of skills and techniques this quarter, which has helped me to improve and progress my writing skills for the future. I will remember the skills, techniques, and tips that professor gave us in this English class for my higher education. For example, all the time that I went to visit professor Sapozhnikov office hours to receive help on my out-of -class essays has helped me to improve, grow, and progress in my writing skills as a writer. Some of the significant changes I have made as I was progressing and growing were to develop a strong thesis to help support my claims as I write my essays, such as facts, observations, illustration, and examples. There are other areas in my writing that I have improved on. I have improved on my grammar, verb constructions, use of verb tenses and organizational skills to make my writing flow better when reading. My overall progress in completing this ten weeks course was wonderful. Every steps and skills I learned in this English class will help me to improve on my writing skills in my other classes and will also help me in my future