Reflective Essay: My Portfolio Of My Writing

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. In the writing process, the step that I feel I have improved a lot is editing, as I am constantly reading my writings and editing them as I finish them, over and over again before I publish them. The steps in the writing process that I like the most are finding a topic in the Pre-writing step and Drafting. I like having a lot of ideas floating around and think about which idea is the best and the most exciting topic to talk about.

My skills for writing are not where I want them to be, but if I feel like I can better respond critically to other individuals points of views. There are a countless number of things I need to work on, but I can say I am still getting better overtime. Taking the writing 102 course made me view writing as less of a burden to me. Writing now does not seem to be very difficult for me, but more fun because I can be more creative and break thing down. There’s more freedom

The reason may be that I do not think much about the sentence structure before I write down something on paper. Also, I try to write really fast in order to put my thoughts down before I forget about them. The SAGES writing crew is very helpful that the tutors point out my grammar mistakes and train me to find my own mistakes. At first, they do not just look through my paper and help me edit it.

References Kendrick, S., Kendrick, A., Nixon, D. (Producers) & Kendrick, S. (Director). (2006). Facing the Giants [Motion picture]. United States: Samuel Goldwyn Films/Destination

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. During the course, I have evolved within my writing due to the specific way this course compartmentalized each step of the writing process. For example, the first three units provided a way to analyze research on a specific topic and critique the data presented in the scholarly article. I have always felt that my research skills were good, however, the feedback received made me realize that I need to critique the studies more to be able to apply the results to my topic of interest.

What if I wrote something that was incorrect? What if there were obvious spelling errors? I fretted about this for a while but begrudgingly went through with the assignment. In the end, it turned out fine and I produced a nice, well-written article.

In a study by Brigham and Spier (1992), 79% of the child protection workers and 76% of the police officers thought that they could for the most part tell when a child lied. This is a problem since confidence is rarely significantly correlated with accuracy, most likely due to relying heavily on nonverbal cues that are misleading (Nysse-Carris et al., 2011). As a group, these studies suggest that police report their confidence as high during certain tasks such as deception detection and are either just as accurate or less accurate than the public. Consistently, research has shown that people are not skilled at judging truth and deception, usually performing at no better than chance level, that training programs produce only limited and unreliable improvements in ones performance, and that police compared to laypeople frequently perform no better (Kassin et al., 2005). A study on layperson confidence and accuracy in deception detection has suggested that overall, judgments of confessions as either true or false were only correct 48.9% of the time, 50% being chance level.

Before attending university, I made a commitment to engage in English classes and join writing workshops, so I could refine my writing. I wanted to learn how to write better essays with a wider range of vocabulary and less grammatical errors. I knew this course would help me improve my writing, though I didn 't know much about the learning process and goals. Through this course, I have realized my weaknesses and strength as a writer and learned how to structure and write an academic essay.

However, I did learn through my years of schooling that being able to read is key to success in any field of employment. I had a personal drive to be able to understand what I am reading, no matter what it may be such as an article in a magazine, a memo from supervisors or policy and procedures of a company. In my spare time, I would read as much as I could to learn new words. Since I come across words every day that are spoken to me that is not understood, I would research the words to better understand what was being discussed. Still to this day, it has become a habit of mine to read any random piece of writing to ensure my understanding continues to grow.

When you write you must research the topic you want to talk about. You must know what sources are acceptable to your teacher and what is not acceptable. When writing a story, you also must analyze in your research to see what was well

To motivate and stimulate the imagination of younger students and provides a strong base structure for older students to create extraordinary effort in their work. Give a student a historical document and have them write an essay about it and watch them struggle as they are limited to the information given within the document. It is true that someone can compare the historical document or any nonfiction article to a fictional example, but there are also limitations to what that person is able to write that is related to the article. Fiction has no limitations to a reader. Whatever they can think of is their own world; it 's their domain.

Making sure there is minimal grammar errors is important, because it will make it easier for the readers to understand the essay, just like the sentence and thesis errors. When I would review my drafts for each essay, I started to look harder for these errors with each essay as the class progressed. I started to find more and more errors that I know I would not have found in the beginning of this class. There is an article that helped me learn to truly revise my essays, the title is, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers”, it is by Nancy Sommers. It is about different strategies students can use to revise their paper.

As a "writer" I 've found my writing style to be more of a put together flourish of words and thoughts that in another 's opinion might seem like it never left the drafting stage (besides the few grammatical edits and big words to make it seem like it was written by someone smart). I went through a stage of writing in purely second person, and because of that I lost the ability to respect the need of more emotional descriptiveness. I 've gotten embarrassed to write in that context and end up passing it up for more serious tones that just don 't get my writing anywhere extraordinary. I want to gain confidence in my writing so I can go the places I want to go with it, while also learning to keep it organized and in line with my exact thoughts. My thoughts seem to provide a more well-laid out idea than my actual writing does.

I have learned so much about writing in the last few months. I have gained confidence in my writing because of the many peer reviews and working drafts. One of my goals is to never settle for “okay”, to keep striving to be better. Once I am happy with how I did in something, I tend to become complacent. I do not want that to happen in my essays.

While taking English 090, I have learned to overcome this fear. Getting feedback from others during workshop days was very useful because I received tips on how to make changes to your paper to make it stronger. This gave me the opportunity to practice my critical reading/thinking skills by actively reading our partners papers. This also gave us the freedom to leave remarks in the margins of others’ essay to not only help them, but help ourselves learn. While writing the unit 3 paper, I got to practice and meet the course objective of actively reading.