Hamilton Hewitt

Professor D. Jizi
UWRT 1103-013
December 13, 2015
A Brief Reflection of the Year
Dear Reader,
As you look through this E-Portfolio you will see the progression of my, Hamilton H.s writing
throughout the semester. There are 4 main areas of writing that all of my work went into. There
was a Blog, Literacy Narrative Essay, a Self-Authorship Project, and the big Extended Inquiry
Project. These four subjects took up the majority of times for this class and were what I received
grades for. What is not on the website is all of the assignments and activities we did to prepare
for each big project or paper or to grow as writers.
Almost every day at the beginning of class, the first 10 minutes would be consumed with
free writing in our notebook. We could write about anything we wanted and there was only one
rule. The only rule we had was we could not stop writing. When we ran out of things to write
about we were instructed to write something over and over until the next topic came to our mind.
At first, I did not like this. I would dread the beginning of each class because I knew what was
coming. As the year went on and I became overwhelmed with school work, I began to see free
writing time as a good thing. Free writing became my escape for a simple twenty minutes a week
and let me get all my frustrations out and vent to myself. We were given another writing
assignment at the end of every week. We created the blog that you see on the website. Each week

we had to write a short blog post talking about the main topic of the past week. These writings
assignments and the journaling had me writing more than ever before and I started becoming a
more confident writer because of it.
We also did many group activities that helped us grow as writers. Almost once a week we
would gather in the groups we were assigned and either discuss a topic or peer edit each others
work. Peer editing was very helpful for me due to many reasons. The first reason is that it
allowed my paper to have a second and third set of eyes review it for mistakes. When my
groupmates would find mistakes in my writing they would kindly show me how to improve my
writing. The other main reason peer editing helped me this year was to see other styles of writing
and learn how other people convey their point of interest. Learning how other people convey
their points of interest in their papers helped me learn different techniques to use for different
people.
My most important work in the class without a doubt is the set of Self Authorship Essays.
These papers are on 5th page of the website titled Self-Authorship. This set of papers are my most
important works because of the effects that writing them had on me. The first self-authorship
essay that I wrote was during the first part of the semester. During this time I was very unsure
about everything. I was becoming discouraged because of the work load from my classes and
beginning if I wanted to be an engineer. A project I had to do for my engineering class coexisted
with this paper. The point of that project was to lay out what I was passionate about and how I
was going to use engineering to make an impact with my passion. I was very lost about what my
passion was or what I wanted to do with it. Who Am I? self-authorship essay helped me take deep
breathes and come back to my passion. It also helped me realize that I wanted to stay an engineer
and even though it was hard, I have succeeded through tougher. The second part of the set of

self-authorship essays was designed to get me to think about what I saw myself doing 5 to 10
years from now. Being able to think about this and express it in a paper was much easier without
the added pressure of the 1201 Engineering class. Having this paper in UWRT 1103 let me calm
down and express myself. In expressing myself through my Who I Want to become essay, I was
able to take those ideas and incorporate them into my Whole Life Concept Paper which is
featured on the last page of the website. The last thing that the Self-Authorship essays helped me
do was to become a more confident writer.
Before I came to UWRT 1103 I did not like writing at all. I had bad experiences with
reading and writing growing up that is discussed in my Literacy Narrative essay located on the
fourth page of the website. During grade school I considered myself a bad writer and I so I tried
to write as little as possible which turned out only to hurt me. Read into my essay on the 4th page
to understand where the resentment for writing came from and how I began to over-come it.
Thinking back over the semester when I would groan and half-way jokingly complain about
being assigned writing tasks to do, I am glad I had to do every one. I do not all of a sudden love
writing, but thanks to UWRT 1103 and the work I had to do in it, including the featured works on
the website, I no longer have resentment towards writing.
During this semester, the biggest thing I was challenged with was time management and
procrastination. This became apparent in my Extended Inquiry Project and the pieces of work
related to it. I struggled with the EIP because of the amount of assignments that I had to be done
for it. Due to my procrastination and work from other courses, attention for this class slipped
occasionally which caused me to fall behind on the project. The purpose of the inquiry project
was to learn how to research a topic not to write a five paragraph essay about it, but to come up
with questions and answers and work from the initial questions to coming up with more

questions after research was done. I enjoyed this project even though I may have fallen behind
once or twice. I enjoyed researching this, and learning a new type of writing. I have never had a
project natured quite like this and I am glad I had it. This website was also a challenge for me. It
was not a challenge because it was hard, but due to my extreme OCD. When I set down to create
this website, it took me way long than I know it should have. It took me much longer than
anticipated because I would change things three or four times because it had to be just write or
everything had to be the same. Learning how to deal with this was an important thing that I will
carry and used the rest of my life.
I have never had to do a project quite like the genre project, extended inquiry project,
self-authorship and literacy narrative essays, or the EPortfolio. Each one of these assignments
made me approach a topic in a direction I have never had to come from before. I liked the
EPortfolio because I liked learning how to make a website and design it to look good. The selfauthorship and literacy narrative essays helped me realize who I was, that I could stay in
engineering, and the direction I could possibly take my life. The extended inquiry project and
genre project turned researching a topic and writing about it in a whole new direction. I enjoyed
learning about the double-entry journal method of taking notes as well as learning the bookcoding system at the library. This semester in UWRT 1103 has been a pleasant realization to me
that writing can be enjoyable. As you look through my website at the different works, I hope you
see the progress that I have made.
Written by Hamilton H.to the readers as a reflection of this website and the works featured in it.