1

Cara Geils
David Thacker
ENC 1101
8 December 2014

Portfolio Memo

As this course comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on how, in only a short
period of time, I have grown and developed immensely as a writer. Before I began
ENC 1101 in the fall of my freshman year, I already had an idea in my head about
what this course would be like. In my mind, this course would act as a refresher
course that would simply touch on all of the topics that I had already learned in
high school. To my surprise, this was far from the truth. In fact, this course opened
the doors to a whole new world for me. Above all, the most important thing that I
learned from this course is that writing is not all about pulling words out of your
head in order to fit formalities such as length requirements. Instead, I learned to
think of the writing process as a personal experience or journey of discovery. A good
piece of writing can take its readers on a journey through time, transport them to a
far off land, or even make the audience feel emotions that they never knew they had.
Although I did a lot of formal writing in high school, I never would have thought that
I would be able to write as efficiently and effectively as I can now, after ENC 1101.
All I needed was a little push in the right direction- from creative writing.
Although I dreaded writing formal essays in response to a prompt, I was at least
comfortable with the general format and structure of that kind of writing. In our
very first creative writing assignment, the Crot essay, I was hit head on with the
struggle of choosing a topic to write on. The Crot essay taught me how to adapt my
writing to the task or situation at hand. For this assignment, I had to delve into the

2
past to recover important memories and then add my thoughts and analysis to
them. I also learned how you can expand on almost everything, whether it be a
sentence or idea. On the other hand, I also noted that sometimes you need to
condense or cut out chunks of your writing because they deter the audience from
the main point that you are trying to get at. In previous writing assignments during
high school, I always struggled to meet the length requirement. This is why at the
end of this paper, when I realized that I went way over the required word count for
this assignment (and had not even noticed), I had an epiphany. Writing isnt all that
bad! I found that if you are interested in the subject, a length requirement will not be
an issue.
Along with my newfound appreciation for writing, I was also able to take some of
the tools that I had learned from the Crot assignment and apply them to the next
two assignments (poetry and feature article). However, like the Crot assignment,
these two assignments were also unchartered territory for me. In the poem
assignment, I learned how to analyze and write different types of poems. The most
important thing that I learned from the poem project is the importance of sensory
detail and word choice. I quickly learned that adding senses can add a whole new
dimension to your writing- just look at the difference between the pretzels or The
crisp, dry biscuits are tied in thin knots and Have been dusted with tiny grains of
salt(taken from my poem School Daze). I now know that by adding sense detail you
can actually let the readers experience your writing. The poetry assignment also
showed me that descriptive words such as dispersed, strike, creeping, or
piercing (words taken directly from each of my poems) are helpful because they

3
engage the reader by showing rather than telling. Unordinary words help make a
piece of writing stand out among the rest- they make it memorable.
Finally, the last assignment that I had in ENC 1101 was to write a feature article,
which helped me to understand the role of the audience in rhetorical decisionmaking. Since each magazine generally has an intended audience (sports lovers,
parents, teenage girls, etc.), it was a little bit easier to narrow down the range of
readers that I would have. After I chose a magazine (general subject) I had to choose
an article topic (specific argument), and then I had to cater to the audiences desires.
As I wrote, I had to think about what language I should use (formal or informal),
what information I should include, and how to make myself seem reliable- all so that
the audience will consider my argument. This project made me realize that all of
these steps are important to think about and consider for any types of writing that I
do because without knowing who your readers are, it will be very difficult to
convince them.
Looking back on these past 15 weeks, I can only think of positive things that this
class has taught me. I have learned so many valuable tools and methods that I have
(once again) exceeded the word limit on this assignment! With everything that I
have learned in this class, I feel prepared to move on in my college career and tackle
more writing assignments. I now know that if I am ever struggling with a writing
assignment I just have to relax and brainstorm, think about my intended audience,
and remember that sense detail and descriptive words are key.