To: Professor McKeever

From: Ashley Gerbec

December 10, 2014
Regarding: Final Course Portfolios and the Reflective Analysis
As I started this class, I was nervous about what this course would involve. College
Composition was the first honors class I had ever taken. I arrived the first day;
anxious, nervous, and lacking confidence. Once you started your introduction, and
as I grew to know you, I felt a lot more comfortable. I really enjoyed your humor,
friendliness and understanding throughout the course. You are an excellent
professor.
My first essay was on socializing in society. The subject I wrote about was based
on a quote I agreed with stating: great minds talk about ideas, mediocre minds talk
about events, and small minds talk about people. I agreed with Shelley in her
statement. I wrote about how the best topic of conversation is to talk about ideas;
putting your mind to its greatest use during daily conversations. For my first essay,
it had numerous errors and corrections. Throughout the course I used less comma
splices and developed into not starting a sentence with the word this.
The second essay was a personal narrative. I chose to write about the early arrival
of my son. I really enjoyed how the first few essays we had a general subject and
got to choose our own story to write about. This helped ease into the harder essays
as the course progressed. I really liked this outline of the course syllabus. I enjoyed
telling my story of the best day of my life, when my pride and joy arrived. This
essay also helped me develop the proper use of quotations and conversation in an
essay. I had never wrote an essay to read like a story from a book before, so I was
happy to acquire a new skill.
The third essay was a character profile. Once again, I enjoyed being able to pick
my own story to tell based off the subject. This free style writing was something I
had never done before. I chose to write a profile entitled The Cheating
Contractor. In this essay, I wrote about my uncle who cheated on his wife and
moved in with his mistress. My growth and development was immense during this
essay. I acquired the skills of how to write a descriptive essay of the characters
traits, gestures, and incidents to let the reader form their own opinion of the
character. I had a lot of fun with this assignment.
The fourth essay was a summary of an article entitled How to Say Nothing in 500
Words. I found this essay to be more challenging then I had expected it to be.

Through this essay, I acquired the skills of learning how to find the major points of
the article that needed to be included in my summary. I found it difficult to
paraphrase what the author wrote, and through practice I learned how to paraphrase
more efficiently. This essay was the first challenging one I endured, and it has
helped me become a better writer.
The fifth essay was to define ten allusions. As the weeks went on, the essays
became more challenging and required more time and effort. Researching ten
allusions then preparing each allusion into a 250 word summary was time
consuming. Also, during this essay, I refreshed my memory on the proper way to
cite documents used. I struggled to find ten allusions of the same subject, and was
relieved when you told me I could use multiple subjects. This essay provided me
with growth of research and citing techniques.
The sixth essay was an extension of the ten allusions I had researched and defined.
This essay was a summary of what allusions teach. I focused on the topic of what
allusions teach about female beauty and prostitutes. This essay once again, was
more challenging and increased my growth by the time I finished it. I learned, for
the first time, how to compile and single out the important information from my
research I had done. I also once again put to practice my summarizing skills of
including only the important, necessary details in the essay.
The seventh essay was evaluating an argument. I read an article by Amy Chua,
on Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior. My development from this essay was vast.
I learned propaganda techniques and logical fallacies to look for when evaluating
an argument. I had never known about these argument techniques, so it was a very
beneficial assignment. I learned how to prove my reasons for disagreeing with the
author, by looking for errors in her writing. This essay was a big step in increasing
my skills as a writer.
The eigth essay was the argument essay. In this essay, I chose the controversial
topic of government regulation of our diets. The argument essay was tedious and
time consuming. My skills of research, citing, and documenting throughout the
article were skills I acquired during this essay. I learned a lot about my topic and
found it challenging to prove my argument by documenting my facts and
contradicting the counter arguments. Over all, this essay was a helpful tool to
become a more advanced writer.
The ninth essay was on a review of a restaurant or movie. I chose to review the
restaurant of Panera. I enjoyed this essay because it was my first time writing a

review. I found it fun and now I accurately know how to write reviews. I now
know topics to talk about when reviewing a restaurant such as menu selections, the
staff, the atmosphere and customer basis.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this class. With the wide selection of different essay
topics, it accurately covered important practice in becoming an accomplished
writer. Your teaching methods and personality were a bonus to making this an
enjoyable class. I look forward to my next semester in your online course of
Honors College Composition II. Thank you for helping make my first semester of
school enjoyable and useful.