Portfolio

Although I have many strengths in my writing skills, I do have weaknesses. Weaknesses are obviously the iffiest part of your paper and are important to work on to make a paper stronger and develop yourself as a writer. My weaknesses are sometimes writing off-subject and failing to anticipate argument with my thesis. By writing-off subject I mean rambling. I tend to write too much on one topic, in detail, and veer away from my ideas. Which makes me sound like I do not know what I'm talking about and can distract the reader. Also, not anticipating objections makes my voice in the paper sound biased and unthoughtful. Those two things completely change to voice and organization of my paper which is extremely important because it allows the reader to not be confused and feel like they can't trust what I am saying. The way I catch these things is usually by reading my paper through with a friend and ask them to pay special attention to it. Once I fix those things, I think I will be...

My strengths as a writer are writing vivid imagery, sentence fluency, developing my ideas, and word choice, and creativity. These strengths have come from the styles of writing I am accustomed to, such as, creative writings, personal narratives, and the brutal research paper and literary analysis. These strengths are what I depend on to write an A paper. I had been told by many peers and teachers that those parts of my paper are wonderful. You want proof? Here's some: -Vivid imagery, creativity, and word choice:      A t that moment, my bathroom door started to open, and I could see the outline of a person on the ground. They seemed tall and muscular. The fear rose inside of me like a boiling pot of water. Then I knew who it was by his silhouette, it was my dad. He army crawled silently across my carpet until he reached my bed and sat next to me. -Excerpt from my Personal Narrative -Sentence Fluency an...

This year I have faced many challenges that have helped me grow as a writer. I have learned new styles of writing like a literary analysis, a research paper, and blog posts that developed my writing skills. I have never even attempted to analyze a book so throughly using its own words as well as mine like I had to in Lord of the Flies . I had to learn how to dig deep into the book not only with my mind, but express what I discovered with words. I learned how to express my thoughts in an effective way while writing the literary analysis. The research paper made me a better paraphraser and summarizer because of the in-depth research that I did on the Holocaust. Reading those horrifying, violent, and long documents required a lot of paraphrasing and summarizing so I wouldn't be plagiarizing and end up with at least a 20 page paper. Another thing I learned in the research paper was how to use in-text citations correctly and create a works cited page, which will come in handy writing ...

When I first get a writing assignment, I think about it for a while and write down the different possible approaches. I take my orange highlighter and cross off the ones that do not seem as interesting until I get down to the last two. I then brainstorm with both ideas using a thought bubble. Depending on which I seem to know more about, I choose an approach. I take the ideas in my thought bubble, elaborate those ideas, and discover the main ideas of my writing. I sort the main ideas into an appropriate order and start the draft. While I write my first draft, I am mainly concerned about the sentence fluency and development of my ideas, basically the flow of my writing. Once I finish, I read through looking for grammatical and sentence structure issues and fix them accordingly. I then go through the paper again to check my word choice to see if there are any unnecessary helping verbs, not vivid enough details, a stronger word I could use, typos, and spelling errors. Once I get through...

The only time I went to the Writing Center during second semester was for my research paper on the Holocaust. I went during English class, and I had my appointment with Taner. I read my paper out loud to him and caught many typos and comma splices. Once I fixed those, we went through the other good traits of writing and worked through my thesis to make sure my thesis was, in fact, the roadmap through my paper. The next thing we worked on was my sentence fluency because there were a few areas in my paper that did not flow as well as others. He asked me to see if I could combine sentences or use better word choice to better express my ideas. At the end of our session, we had worked through the rest of the good traits of writing, voice and ideas, and I felt more confident in my paper. The next time I revised my paper I knew how to check and correct my organization, word choice, ideas, voice, sentence fluency, and conventions. This allowed my paper to meet most of the expectations, I jus...