Chase Rackemann

Suzanne Ingram
UWRT 1102
4/28/15
FPE FINAL
Throughout this semester I have learned a substantial amount of information about
writing and improved my writing a great deal. In this Portfolio reflection I am going to reiterate
what I have learned and how I have gotten better. I am going to touch on in my opinion the 3
main key concepts, which are critical thinking, writing process and revision, and intellectual
growth. I am also going to give a step by step by step introduction to the organization and design
of my E-Portfolio and lastly I will be clarifying why exactly I chose some of the assignments in
my E-Portfolio.
E-Portfolio Organization
My E-Portfolio consist of multiple pages to help document and show all of the work I
have done over the semester. When first entering the website you will be greeted with an
Introduction page with a short paragraph explaining exactly what my E-Portfolio is. Next you
will see a More button in the top right corner and hovering over it you will see three pages
to choose from. Blogs has all 9 of the assigned blogs in order from 9-1 starting at the last one
we turned in, down to the first. Portfolio has the majority of the work for my E-portfolio inside
of it. I decided to put the majority of my work on this page so everything flows fluently from one
to another, I did this by using sub-headings and text beneath them explaining each assignment.

When you click you will be shown my Portfolio Essay as the first piece of work, which you are
currently reading. Followed by that you will see the final drafts of the following: Research Essay,
3 Column Notes, and my Midterm. After that when you scroll you will see my Writers
Notebook Artifacts 1 and 2, followed by my Process Work Artifact 1-4, my Feedback
Artifacts 1 and 2 and followed by my final 2 Wildcards. Some of these like the feedback
artifacts are imbedded pictures into the portfolio. The reason I could not upload these digitally, is
because I had to show where or how I gave or received feedback, along with my writing process
for my essay. Above each entry is a small text box explaining exactly what you are looking at
and a brief explanation of the assignment.
Key Concepts
The key concepts I am going to talk about are critical thinking, writing and revision
process, and intellectual growth. Critical thinking is one of if not the most important needed
concept in writing. Being able to look at or into a subject for any amount of time and after giving
it serious thought before forming an opinion is huge with writing. When writing you are going to
come across topics that you dont necessarily like or agree with that you still have to write on.
For me it was my Essay assignment where critical thinking was huge. Vaporizers are a brand new
object that are under a lot of heat and general scrutiny. Even though I had already been vaping
when doing my research I had to read into all of these different studies, look at their conclusions
and form my own separate opinion on what I thought and how I perceived them. Continuous
blog post and warm ups in class all helped me with my critical thinking, because I had to be
aware of my subjects and adapt my opinions and thoughts as I did work.
The next key concept I am going to talk about is writing and revision process. Before
college when I wrote a paper I was just done with it. It was rare for me to even go back and read

it before turning it in. Now after 1101 and 1102 I go back and read something 5 times before
turning it in. Now after going through these classes I fully assess the information I have before
writing and inquire the research while Im writing and afterwards. The revision process is
extremely important. Reading what I wrote before finishing allows me to make changes, reword
entire sentences or paragraphs to sound better and just in general make my paper ten times better.
What has helped me with this is just college in general, college professors just do not cut as
much slack as high school teachers do so when you turn something in it has to be perfect because
some professors will take your paper and nit-pick until you have no grade to even build upon
anymore.
The last key concept I am going to talk about is intellectual growth. Everyone should
always be in the process of bettering themselves in some way. For many people it is learning
information on a topic, for others it is in a certain craft or hobby. But no matter what, we are
always learning thus improving our intellectual growth. UWRT 1102 helped me in a number of
ways improve upon my intellectual growth when it comes to writing. After the semester I have
become a better writer in many different ways. For example in my Mid-Term before I revised it,
I was bad at introducing quotes from other sources, this is my original quote Here is a quote
from my 2nd blog post but after speaking with Ms. Ingram and her telling me how to improve it
my revised mid-term said this In my 2nd blog post I talked about the difference between vaping
and cigarettes by talking about the harm that is caused by cigarettes but not vaporizers here:
followed by the quote from my blog post. It is small details and tips we get during this class that
help change yourself to become a better writer. Now I wont make the same mistake again while
writing, so my intellectual growth on the subject has increased. Before my essay, although I used
a vaporizer I did not know much about the topic. After doing all the research and reading study

after study by these colleges I was well informed on the topic and actually knew what I was
talking about while writing the blog post and later on in the semester, my final essay.
How My Writing Has Grown
My writing has no doubt in my mind got leagues better since before last semester, I now
make multiple drafts before committing my paper on big projects like mid-terms and essays. I
like to work on paper because I can mark through things and write something else while still
keeping the old writing in mind. It just shows me what I have changed and how I made it better,
where on a computer I cannot do that so most of my writing are done on paper. For example my
thesis rough draft says Vaporizers are a new and developing technology that is used to help
smokers stop smoking and now that part is marked out and above it I have Vaporizers are a
new age technology that are steadily developing and being researched to help contribute to
helping smokers quitting. It is minor changes like that than can help make entire papers better
that I have noticed my improvement of, I read a lot so I would like to assume I have a nice
vocabulary, but the majority of the time after writing a draft I will go through and look for
sentences where better vocabulary words can help the sentence and take it to the next level.
This class has also showed me new ways of reading and learning through my research.
The three column notes we did were very important to because with my topic of vaporizers being
so new I had to read study after study after study and the columns helped me a lot. I could read a
study, put the link in the left column and type out a summary of it so I wouldnt have to go back
and read the entire thing again later, I really liked this because it saved me time in the long run
while sifting through all my studies. For example, in my original 3 column notes I explained
what happened in a study done by a group of medical professionals from the University of
Sydney and their medical program. This study is a smoking cessation study which involved

7551 people over the course of 6 months to a year. And later in the summary This study found
that after 6 months, 18% of people in the study had stopped smoking or had marginally
decreased their current cigarette consumption. This type of note taking makes my work
substantially easier in the long run and thats why I am glad I was introduced to it. I would also
like to say that warm-ups before class helped me personally because if I was having a slow or
sluggish day the warm-up would get me thinking and get me in classroom ready mode before we
all really started talking about our writing and class began. The warm-ups also allowed me to
come up with and ask you questions that were not really on my mind until the warm-up, all
around I think it was a great short task to have at the beginning of class.
Explaining the Portfolio
My portfolio consists of a lot of different work that we have done throughout the entire
semester so far. Now I would give insight on why I thought these were the best for my portfolio.
I am going to go in order by my E-portfolio, so I will start with the 4 process work artifacts. The
first artifact here is my sticky notes from my final essay, I chose this because my writing process
can be very hectic. I prefer writing on paper over using a computer so my work space is limited a
lot of the times. I chose the sticky notes because they helped me keep my essay in order while I
was writing, I wrote the major topics on them and moved them around based on where I wanted
them in my paper. My next process work artifact is a paper we had to write with 3 sources before
going to the library to work with the librarians, I chose this because it showed my thought
process on why I chose my essay topic and I thought it was a helpful assignment at that
particular stage in my writing. The third process work artifact is my essay thesis very rough
draft, in it you can see I have marked through some stuff and wrote a better sentence above, a
note to myself on the side to look over blog post, the topics I want in the following paragraphs

below are listed under it, along with some research I did on Blu branded e-cigarettes. I chose this
because it shows my hectic draft style, I have collected a lot of papers similar to this with work,
drafts, notes to myself and research written down all over them since my essay has started. My
final process work artifact is my rough draft of a paragraph on E-juice and what is in it. On top is
rough draft with an arrow pointing at it that says clean up entire thing and below it is a refined
paragraph that says cleaned up version. I also chose this one because it is a rough draft that
does a good job portraying my writing and drafting style.
Next are my 2 Writers Notebook Artifacts which were anything from your notebook
that were important to your learning. The 1st one is a PDF of the textbook that you scanned for
us at the beginning of the year. I chose this because like I said earlier in this paper, critical
reading is a huge deal in writing. This PDF you scanned goes into critical reading and writing
and many other useful techniques like inferring from text, interpreting visuals we see and
previewing text rhetorically. Some of the stuff I read in this first reading has stuck with me for
the rest of the semester and I dont plan on forgetting it anytime soon, that is why I chose this
PDF. The second Writers notebook artifact I chose was a site from my own research, it is a fact
sheet about lung cancer and how it is affecting us in the United States. This was a big deal to me
because in my earlier stages of research it showed me how big of a deal lung cancer was and
how I could educate people who didnt know anything about vaporizers because they could stop
people from getting lung cancer. The site in question was mainly using US statistics but nearly 6
million people die per year from tobacco use.("Fast Facts." Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 24 Apr. 2014. Web. 18 Apr. 2015.)
Lastly, My 2 Wild Cards are a warm up from back in January, and another excerpt from
our book which helped me a lot. The warm-up I chose is from January 29th and it was asking

about rhetorical questions in research. I responded saying that rhetorical standpoints when
looking into research are valuable because they help you recognize all new perspectives you
usually wouldnt have thought of, so it leads to more raw and open research. I think this warm up
was helpful to me and I think for the rest of the semester I kept my answer in mind. Next, the
excerpt from our book was pages 406-425, which was some reading we had to do. It was a good
section that taught methods and gave tips on handling sources, I had a lot of sources to handle
due to my topic so this was very helpful. It also gave tips on the correct ways to search when
looking for resources which was very informative.
Lastly, we have to explain the grade we think we deserve based on the e portfolio grading
scale. I would give myself an A-, I completed all parts of the A grading scale except 5 quotes
from my work, I only had 3. I do believe this E-Portfolio was exemplary work and I am proud of
the finished product showing everything we did throughout the semester.

I feel your pain on amount of sources you had. I think you did a decent job of explaining each
element of your portfolio, there really wasnt anything you didnt cover.
-hiatt

10/10 would read again and I like the sub headings. Fantastic.

This was a very well written paper. It was very informative and some of the things you wrote
were very philosophical and well thought out sentences. You also covered everything that needs
to be covered and you did a very good job talking about them. Very Good Job!