Thornton 1 Lynda Thornton ENGL 1202-049 Spring 2013 Portfolio Essay Hello and welcome to my portfolio!

This essay is intended to walk you through what I have learned this semester and how this can be reflected in my writing. To begin, I feel that I have learned how to provide feedback much better than I did at the beginning of the semester. I have learned to open up about things I'm not used to sharing with most people such as my sexual orientation and my childhood. I have allowed my natural curiosity to run rampant in my writing by letting the skills I have learned in research for this class leak over into my other classes. I have also gained the knowledge needed to elaborate appropriately without getting off topic, which I usually do. I think that it is important that I show who I am,and it is very recognizable in the decor of my eportfolio. The banner on the top of my Weebly is a picture of the evolution of man. This shows a glimmer into how much I love mankind. I am a future anthropologist and I am absolutely fascinated with man, so I know I will never be bored with my chosen profession. My color scheme is burnt orange, or the color of clay, representative of the clay ground around my home. In my future profession, I'll be seeing a lot of this color seeing as how our ancestors used to make their prehistoric Tupperware out of fire hardened clay. It is the color of my past, present, and future, and I do not think any color could represent me better. The first piece that I have written you see is, in fact, this essay. While the choice may seem arbitrary, it is anything but. How could I throw you into my portfolio without first telling you what you are seeing? My portfolio is supposed to serve as a guide to tell you how my writing has evolved and what I will retain from my inquiry course. It tells you why I chose to organize the way that I did, and even serves as the perfect introduction to myself and my writing! Buckle up and get ready for the ride!

Thornton 2 The next tab you will encounter is for my blog posts. These blogs had assigned topics, and may have had a certain requirement for what they were supposed to mean, but I feel that these supposedly restricted blogs allowed me to shine. The absence of a formal document has allowed me to be myself and show that to you. Sometimes they made me over think, and a few times I had to go back and correct them, but having this personal walk through for myself so that I could make sure I was on track with my assignments really helped me out. They are listed in chronological order because I wanted the reader to know how my professor kept us up to date with how far we should be with our inquiry journeys, as well as make us think more about what we were trying to convey and who we doing so for. I think my What's It Like To Be Me essay, which is in the next tab, shows the most progress in my whole portfolio. When I started the course I was a little worried about how I was presenting myself and how people would react to who I am as a person, seeing as how I am not exactly normal. I even wrote some of my concerns down during a warm-up and it is included in my daily entries section. I brought my first draft to class and Adam, Amber and Craig told me to do exactly what I had been yearning to do. I wanted to tell my story, and be truthful. I was scared and thought that no one would like what I had to say, but after I drew up my second draft, you told me that you were completely engaged with my writing and I got beyond excited. I went home and expressed more. And then, even more. I ended up talking about so much of my life that I had to cut myself short. This simple 4 page essay is now the beginning to my life, and while my past and present are cemented and amazing, it showed me that the future is so open. The midterm letter demonstrates my personality. Hell, it almost shoots it at you with a bazooka. How can a letter to my best friend be anything but outrageous? I expressed my frustrations with English such as Why can I capitalize you? How selfish can I be? in relation to the fact that I have capitalize the first letter in I, but not in you. I also told him how much I loved the WILTBY assignment and about a few of the fears I had for that particular assignment. I got to tell him about how much my

Thornton 3 WILTBY assignment had inspired me, and that I felt like my writing had developed in leaps and bounds, and I was not even close to being finished. I had so much more growing to do, and I did not see an end in sight. On the fourth tab, you'll find the piece I do not want you to see. I think that my annotated bibliography is my weak point. I felt so restricted because everyone in my group had relatively short annotations. In my field of study, you are supposed to take notes on what you read, as well as identify what facts or ideas came from each article. Most of my annotations are at least a page long for every piece I read. I had an extremely hard time summarizing such crucial information in two pages. This shows me that this might be one of my Achilles heels, and seeing as how I do not ever really show true contempt for my own work unless it is sub par, this is what I need to work on in order to progress as a writer. When you move on to my Argumentative Research Essay, you can see that my first copy is an absolute mess. I had no idea what I was doing, and in addition, I was not even sure what my purpose was. I used the side shadowing exercise in order to help myself organize my thoughts. It showed me where I needed to elaborate in order to make my paragraphs into cohesive statements, and where I was getting off topic. After fixing these mistakes, I handed my essay off to my girlfriend, and she was probably the hardest critic I've ever had. In some instances, she even marked through whole lines and rewrote them in the margins. I gave her my paper expecting to get a few grammatical errors fixed, but it is better that she actually helped me identify a few of the statements that were making my point muddled. This is one of the main reasons I am including the first draft of my essay in my responses section. The feedback I received was phenomenal and without it, I do not think it would be as amazing as it is. By the time you received my essay, one of the few things I needed help with was my audience, and your idea of making it into a letter to provoke a call of action inspired me to do exactly that. I have pondered the question of who to address my letter to for the past few weeks now and decided that I

Thornton 4 should take a risk and send it to the U.S. Department of the Interior, Indian Affairs. I believe that the information I gathered could shed light on a subject that is being overlooked and proves to be very detrimental to Native Americans. My daily entries, responses, and articles are all put on the same tab so that you can see miscellaneous work all in one spot. It shows a few of the exercises that pushed me in the right direction, for instance, my notes on our reading that helped me identify the audience for my argumentative essay. I included a Warm-Up about my WILTBY assignment that outlines what I was struggling with at first about my outlook on life and how I did not think anyone would want to hear what I had to say. I was so worried about what to say and even expressed that My life is beautiful and amazing, but only because of the shitty one I've led. In addition, re-reading my response to What Does Inquiry Mean? helped me realize that there were questions I was missing in my research essay such as how a high starch diet affects a body. My responses show how I react to other peoples writing and how other people react to mine. I hope it shows that I give good feedback, like in the case of Brandi's WILTBY essay where I asked her if she had gotten accepted into the school she was dying to go to. This demonstrates that I am considerate of the writer when it comes to my criticism, but still want to ensure that the readers questions do not go unanswered. I also utilized the first draft of my Argumentative Research Essay as well as the second draft of my Portfolio Essay because I received some downright amazing feedback on both essays; some from my girlfriend, some from my friend Robert who helped me with my wording, and a little from my peers in class who admired my way with words and gave me tons of encouragement. I included the handout on Rhetorically Reading Your Sample Argumentative Research Essay because these are the guidelines I used to help my peers work through their own problems with their essays. I learned to look for the audience and thesis when acting as a reader, and if I am left with any

Thornton 5 questions, I should ask the author if they intended to leave the reader wondering. One of the most important articles I read all semester was the Responding article by Richard Straub. This piece showed me that I should never make assumptions about the writer, abbreviate, or pretend as if I like a piece even if I do not. I should suggest what the writer should do and it is not my responsibility to rewrite parts of someone elses paper. I absolutely loved this article and I plan on using it in the future when I help my friends and family with their writing exercises. Now that you know all about my portfolio, I encourage you to go online and explore it. Don't just skim over it and slap an A on it because I have all of the required assignments. I want you to see how hard I have worked this past semester and then give me YOUR judgment. I want to know how I can improve even more and most importantly, I want to know if I'm doing something wrong. I am still growing as a writer, and I do not think this is the be all end all. I have my whole future ahead of me, and while I may deserve a high grade because of the effort I have put forth, I want you to keep in mind that me three years from now is changing the world, possibly one word at a time. Thank you for the help Ms. Ingram!