Introduction

For my in class writing portion of my portfolio I chose the two pieces that I feel like I got
the most out of and I also feel like they were my best two entries. The first entry is about me, the
writer. This writing is about what I like read and write, why I enjoy reading and writing about
this, my strengths and weaknesses, and what I want to improve in this class. The second writing,
“Artifact”, was a writing to help me with my ethnography project and how to define an artifact
from the short story, “Everyday Use”.
My blogs, or journal entries, include two posts that helped me focus on certain points of
the ethnography project I am currently working on, which are titled: “Bowling Ball Boulevard”
and “I Pick Things Up, I Put Them Down”. The community I am researching is the Thornburg
Gym at Bridgewater State University. These two posts helped me get started with my project by
telling readers what I already know about the community I am studying and how descriptive I
have to be while observing, taking notes, and writing about this community.
I had to make many revisions to my first essay titled, “Forever Focusing on Fitness”. This
first essay is about the community I am studying and what I already knew about and what
questions I want to know about that I don’t already know. Revisions I had to make were to write
more clearly and realize who the audience is, such as a naïve reader. Paragraph organization was
also a big revision I had to change about my paper. At times I would jump around on different
topics, but after revising and reorganizing my paper looks much better than what the rough draft
was. My final essay is clearer, understood, and organized with the same great original thoughts.
Seeing that I have only wrote so much for this semester I cannot truly say how I have
improved as a writer, but I will say that I now know exactly what the teacher expects and I can
say my writing will improve dramatically to her standards. At times I can be a disorganized
writer by just writing what is exactly on my mind and coming up with great ideas and being
repetitive, but after I have to spend more time revising my work and organizing it all together to
make a better piece of work.