Jordan Sazama

Olivia Stoltman

E-Portfolio Reflection

English 110

E-Portfolio Reflection Sazama 1

At the beginning of the year it was my main goal to break out of 5 paragraph form and to build

analysis skills and I feel I have done both. All throughout high school I was stuck in a 5-

paragraph essay form and this year through the essays we were assigned to write I was able to

break free and learn a new skill. This is a large accomplishment for me because previously I was

unable to complete this task. Even upon looking at the writing used in each 5/5/5, I can see a

drastic change through word usage, sentence structure and overall flow. I feel this has caused my

goals to change a little bit because they are now more specific and now focus on strengthening

my skills instead of creating them. My goals are now to try and improve flow of my writing and

to increase the amount of description used in my writing. Along the course of the semester, I did

have my struggles both with class and with writing. In the beginning and periodically throughout

the year it was difficult to become adapted to the flow of the class and the flow of assignments. I

occasionally missed the turn in for assignments which in the end cost me crucial points or

availability to turn in artifacts for journal entries. As the year went on, I felt I got better however

this was something I struggled with the entire semester. At the beginning of the year I also

struggled figuring out where to start on my essays and how to begin each piece I was writing. I

eventually got better at this skill and it no longer became a large struggle. As the year

progressed, I feel my writing style has drastically changed and I can see it as I go through the

course of the year in the pieces I have written. As I corrected the literacy narrative written as the

first essay, I feel I was very disorganized, and my ideas were all over the place. This is due to the
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fact that I didn’t engage in much pre-writing, I free wrote the essay and corrected my errors at

the end. During the year I discovered that this way of writing wasn’t right for me and I needed to

figure something else out. I began pre-writing and setting up my essay by creating bullet points

and organizing my thoughts before the writing even began. In addition, I also feel that my ideas

of revision and correcting my essays has drastically changed since this class first started. Instead

of looking for misspelled words and adding commas to places, I then looked for how to change

the overall flow and organization of my pieces of work. My focus turned to finding awkward

sentences and adjusting the story portion of my writing. This was done greatly through the help

of my peers. As we did peer reviews, my group was able to read my essay and find awkward

sentences that I otherwise thought was fine because I knew what I was trying to say. I feel this

was a large help because my peers were able to find issues that I could not have found on my

own. Even though it may have been weird at first, I think the reading out loud really helped my

writing because when read aloud, especially by somebody else, I found many errors that

otherwise would have went unnoticed. In the future I am absolutely going to use this technique

in order to revise my essays because I think it is incredibly successful. I found many reoccurring

issues in my writing that I was pushed to fix as the year progressed. The most prevalent was the

repetition of words and using the same sentence format over and over. Without peer review, I

doubt I would have been able to figure this issue out and it would probably still be unnoticed. I

also found that I am not very good at following formatting and every peer review my group

would comment on the wrong formatting I had my essay in. Aside from peer review I feel my

instructor also had a large role in helping craft the best writer I can be. I feel the best comments

my instructor had made were on the flow and overall ideas of the essay because my peers
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covered the rest with punctuation and word choice. My instructor was able to find overall big

picture fixes that once again I wouldn’t have been able to find on my own. As the semester

comes to end, the main project is to create an e-portfolio with a summation of all the work done

all semester. I had never done this in the past and all semester I really looked forward to creating

my website. I feel it has greatly improved my skills as a writer because it made me move outside

of my comfort zone and create something in a fashion, I hadn’t done yet in my writing career.