Hernandez 1

Anthony Hernandez

Dr. Sharity Nelson

ENGL 1302-104

12/02/21

Portfolio Reflection

With the grade alone I received on each essay I thought there would be a plentiful amount

of editing and “rhetorical choices” that needed to be made in order to maximize each essay.

Throughout each essay I mostly failed on producing a solid controlling idea and further failed to

provide a firm or clear perspective with supporting evidence. So editing each essay came with a

lot of addition rather than subtraction from these essay’s. However, there were a good number of

things that were completely taken out of my essay’s altogether like sentences or some evidence

quotes. Here are some examples of how I bettered essay 1. If you read the introduction from my

final draft, compared to my final revised draft you see that I attempt to try and get the reader to

clearly understand the idea of the paper. I see how before in the final draft the paper was

intensely broad and the sentences and words, I was putting down weren’t really going anywhere

it was like I was just reading along waiting for the paper to get more interesting. Now with

changing up the introduction, specifically the end of the introduction since I didn’t really get rid

of anything, but instead I added onto what was already said to try to solidify my idea / thesis to

the reader. For essay 2 the same exact concept takes place, as I said early in the introduction the

similar problem occurred throughout all three of my essay’s, that problem being that I failed to

provide a solid controlling idea. The subject / topic was very clear though it was far too broad, I

needed to focus on something specific within the boundaries of what I was already talking about.

This is exactly what I attempted to do for essay 2. Essay 2’s introduction was stupendously
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organized and failed to deliver any sort of solid controlling idea at all. Most notably at the end of

the introduction in essay 2 final draft you’ll see that I basically just threw information at the

bottom of the paragraph to close it rather than closing it with my claim / idea along with that

evidence. So that’s exactly what I tried doing, for multiple parts across the essay I added as little

as one sentence here and one sentence there that would allow the paper to naturally present the

idea I originally wanted to present. To be more specific, throughout every paragraph where

evidence was presented it wasn’t really attributing to anything I was writing down. It was

basically like I was putting down facts for a subject I was touching upon, rather than using that

evidence to support a specific idea or claim upon a certain subject which for this essay was

childhood development. For essay 3 in the introduction section of the final draft you’ll see I have

deleted entirely where I state, “For such a serious subject that position is very understated

because the emotions a teen could experience in school even without the technology or social

media is life changing!” I placed the very last sentence of the introduction of the final draft more

toward the center of my introduction as that statement is a very generalized statement / reality of

what my paper will talking about. Throughout the final revision essay there are more sentences

that are entirely omitted in comparison to the original final draft, dumb phrases that just

shouldn’t be in this professional paper like, “Imagine all the cyber bullying that goes on every

second in every country, in every state, and in every city!” (Paragraph 2) There was a statement I

made at the start of paragraph 3 regarding how an individual will process emotions differently

from one another. Immediately after I tried inputting evidence about some positive repercussions

of social media, this just didn’t make sense at all. It was either I changed my topic sentence, or I

change the evidence I presented to match the topic sentence I already had. Rather than changing

anything at all, I kept the fact that an individual will process emotions differently because I
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further elaborate how a good situation could be a bad to others and vice versa. First hand I didn’t

think about elaborating about this but after receiving feedback it’s very clear to see how a reader

other than myself the writer could see no background on those two sentences that were poorly

placed together. Elaborating on how one takes in a situation differently and using social media as

an example was better, and those examples are also representations of what positive

repercussions could be. At the end of page 4 I also split the paragraph in two. The sentence at the

bottom of page 4 which states, “, yet simple example of how technology and the applications

available on them could have a physical and mental effect on a person’s day to day life.”

Immediately after that sentence is now a new paragraph named “Root of Emotional

Dysregulation.” I split this up because originally the paragraph of consequence was way too long

and it began to steer into too many different directions. I feel where I split the two paragraphs is

a perfect place to do so.

Rhetorical choices I made when creating my website were slim. When creating the

website I tried to put as little information regarding what the “reader” was going to view. I didn’t

want to put a revised essay section where my essay 1, 2, and 3 all go and then with the little

textboxes that I’ve put for each of them put a small description of the essay. While I still did do

that I did it in an Abstract way. The same way a lab report has an abstract section or any research

article we ourselves used for these essays is what I tried doing but on a much smaller scale. For

example for essay 2 since it speaks heavily upon child development the section I inputted my

drafts was called “Continuous Search”, reason being I was continuously searching and trying to

provide information on a topic I believed should be spoken about more seriously. For essay 1 I

put a much larger abstract than the others since it’s a research question essay that requires a lot of

attention from paragraph to paragraph. You could see a similar abstract section in essay 3’s page.
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I know this is a very broad answer but every single homework assignment that was

assigned the week two drafts were due on a Tuesday and Thursday. These homework

assignments at least I think were specifically assigned on these days for us to maximize our

knowledge and help in writing the essay we currently were doing. Each essay did this for both

Tuesday and Thursday, I most specifically remember a very certain homework assignment that

required us to look at a website to adopt dogs. This aided in writing essay 2 tremendously,

although I did very poor on essay 2 it did not fail to help me see the bigger picture. Not essay 2

but the annotated bibliography for essay 2. Which I also did poor in…. However, it was very

helpful to see how the website organized information straight and to the point in order to get the

most information to the reader as possible. This homework assignment specifically I also

remember required the analyzation of two other documents, these documents being

representations of essay 2 and the annotated bibliography that were due that week. Another

homework assignment I vividly remember from these weeks essays were due was the week of

essay 3. We had two assignments this week and both were extremely helpful in completing essay

3 and also preparing for the final portfolio. The assignment helped tremendously on

understanding what a position essay was and how essay 3 was to be written. I remember the

information regarding how to create a website and the portfolio was more heavily touched on. It

helped me understand that I needed to put a very hefty number of things into my portfolio. I

learned from these assignments that we needed to have every single essay draft from each essay

written, a final revised essay for each final draft essay, annotated bibliography, final portfolio

reflection essay, instructor feedback, peer review feedback, and any homework assignments that

assisted in helping write the essays. Realistically every single homework assignment is designed

for us to better our skills in English and therefore helps us write every essay. Though again,
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realistically if you take a close look into it there are only few homework assignments that are

really specifically designed for the blueprint of an essay, portfolio, or annotated bibliography and

those are the ones that could be found on my website. As I mentioned these homework

assignments are the ones that were specifically posted the week an essay was due, or the week of

finals / final portfolio was due.

I learned way more than I thought I would in English 1302 this semester. I don’t hate

English but truthfully it’s far from my favorite subjects, I prefer numbers, principles, laws, and

equations rather than the concept of English. Well that’s a lie cause I really enjoy writing as you

could probably tell it’s too easy for me to talk an endless amount about basically nothing which

is what I’m doing now. What I most importantly learned was professionalism, for the type of

career I want which would be some kind of great engineer or great scientist it would require me

to publish a lot of professional documents. It’s very clear that beforehand and even still now

maybe I was very bad at producing a professional document that is directed toward a “scholarly

audience.” However, I could confidently say now that I am far better than I was before in

producing a professional document. I also learned how easy an essay could flow if topic

sentences are correctly placed with the correct evidence / correct placeholders. For a long time

and again even still now I’d write an essay about an idea and I’d poorly present that idea and

then try backing it with evidence which made the idea and evidence seem weak. Though the way

I was bringing up the topic to present was entirely wrong, being blunt but also scholarly I found

it much easier to make a claim or statement and then back it up with evidence shortly after.

Instead of talking on and on about a subject trying to get the reader to understand it made it much

easier to get straight to the point with a topic sentence and then place evidence shortly after or

sometimes even shortly before so I could better present my idea.

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There honestly isn’t anything at all I don’t see myself applying to other courses.

Everything that I’ve learned from this class has been used in all the classes I’m currently taking.

The only thing I wouldn’t be able to apply to other courses is equations and concepts, principles

and laws, labs, anything I’m not really writing? Though there are so many things I’ve taken from

this class that could be applied to so many things other than just writing.

My writing I feel has improved tremendously throughout the semester. I feel like it was

always there and there is still a lot more to it, but I didn’t have the right challenge to bring it out

of me. Yes Dr. Nelson, you were an incredible challenge for me but an incredible challenge that

everybody needs to face in their life! Far too many people take this subject way too unserious

and me being an engineering / science major should be one of those people who take the class far

from serious, however my passion to write after taking your class has only grown. Rather than

feeling a tedious way about writing anything at all really from lab reports to articles and essays, I

almost look forward to it in a way and I could confidently say that is because of your doing Dr.

Nelson. I could very confidently say that the thing that has most improved over the course of this

semester is my confidence in my writing and just the general writing itself. I looked at an essay

from 1301 to now and that professor did not challenge me nearly as much as you did because

that was such a hard essay to read but I received half the feedback I did from you. Reading what

I’ve recently turned in now I could see there is actually a process, there is actually a solid paper

being built and although they could be so much better I know that they’re much better than

before.

The most challenging part of creating this website was honestly just the website itself,

writing every single essay including this one was honestly a pleasure. The website just began to

become very buggy and laggy whenever there was a large amount of information on the website
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after a while. Even though I was pulling my hair out a lot sitting here writing this now with only

two hours to go before the final submission I could smile and think about how I honestly enjoyed

this class.

I feel it’s changed a lot; I feel my identity as a writer was very unknown almost before

this class. Now I feel like if you read any one of my papers although they may not be good or

organized in a well manner all the time, you could see there is passion and an urge to talk on and

on upon a subject or task I was given.