Navdeep Singh

First Year Writing

Professor Roeder

05/02/2023 Portfolio Letter

My portfolio includes each major project that was completed over the course of the

semester: a self-portrait discussing the parallels of my life and Indian Masala Chai, a newspaper

article about the Oppression of Sikhs in India, and a Children’s book about the struggles of a

Indian Kid who recently moved to a new country. Even though these three projects required

different literary approaches, they all relay a common message: my relationship with different

aspects of my identity. For example, the self-portrait signifies the impact my cultural background

has had on my daily life in the form of something as simple as tea. The topic of my research

project is evident of the passion I possess for my religion and its believers. Finally, the

Children’s book contains elements of my own life as I have also sometimes struggled to fit in

due to my appearance: specifically my turban. All three of these projects can be seen as dishes

that contain the different ingredients of my life which come together to produce unique and

varying flavors. Due to this and also as a homage to my spice-dominant Indian background, I

named my portfolio Spice: Flavors of My Life. Along with these major projects, I have added

my poetry response along with my reading response to Rankine and Kennedy. Both of these can

be seen as the appetizers of my portfolio, that lead up to the main course which would be my

projects. To end off my portfolio, I decided to sweeten things up by adding my Sensory Detail

Exercise.
 Throughout this semester, I have constantly struggled with timing, as it often took hours

to even write a page of writing that I was satisfied with. As a biology major, this may have been

due to the fact that I have not completed as many papers or writing assignments in College than I

did in High School. As the semester went by, my thoughts became much more fluid and it

became easier to transfer them on to paper. I believe this was propelled by the different genres of

writing conducted such as poems, newspaper articles, sensory paragraphs, and reflection essays.

However, I still need much more practice in order to become a better writer. Each of the projects

that I completed made me reflect on my writing ability in different ways. My thought process

while approaching each project was also very different as my goal and the genre of the writing

varied.

In order to complete this assignment of a self-portrait to the best of my ability, I had to

make sure that I touch on all the aspects of my life that were affected by the incident I narrate in

my writing. I found this difficult to do since I didn’t want the writing to lose its clarity, so I had

to make sure each part ties into each other. I also had difficulty with being descriptive of the

incident I narrate, as I often found myself to be telling of certain details instead of showing them

through sensory description. This was a major issue that I honed in on when I was revising my

first draft. I also tried to make my writing more engaging right from the start by incorporating

imagery and sensory detail to help the reader imagine the scenario I describe.

When I first started this assignment, my goal was to make a writing piece that I was

comfortable with calling a self-portrait. In order to do this, I thought about all the necessary

elements of my identity I had to include, such as my cultural background and major incidents or

events that shaped my personality. A major challenge was actually tying these elements together
to form a cohesive final product. However, I believe I did a somewhat good job of doing so. I

also realized how hard it is to write a paper that is focused on your life. Normally, I tend to

complete normal literary essays without much hassle. However, this piece took a lot of time as I

was often stuck on the direction of my essay. I experienced a writer’s block after I wrote my first

draft, as I did not know what I could add more. I learned that adding more writing can hurt the

rhythm of the entire piece especially if the new writing doesn’t mesh with the main idea. I

believe this a flaw of my final draft as I struggled to meet the five-page requirement and ended

up adding things I wasn’t really satisfied with. However, I aim to focus on this weakness and get

better at writing more cohesive papers. This is exactly what I tried to do with my Research

Project.

When conducting research, I generally believe that it is important to choose something

that intrigues one’s interests. While thinking about what I should do my research about, I first

thought about my identity and the issues that matter to me the most. Instead of basing my project

around teaching an audience on how to do something, I aimed to inform my audience of a

political and social issue that is not popular but has immense significance to my life. However,

since I was going to write about a historical event, I had to make sure to have a clear goal about

the purpose of my writing, which was to bring to light the injustices Sikhs in India have dealt

with over the last 40 years.

The first page of my project consists of historical context regarding the political issue

since I believe it is important to understand why such abuses happened in the first place.

Something I could have done better was making this section shorter than it ended up being since

I don’t want to lose the reader’s attention with that much writing. I could have also added more
than one photo to this page to make it more visually appealing. However, since I was aiming for

a newspaper themed project, I did not want to overpower my project with too many pictures. I

could have also used bullet points to organize my writing instead of using long paragraphs.

The second and third pages of my project include a more in-depth description of the

abuses faced by the Sikh people of India. Instead of just pointing out what happened, I also made

sure to explain why whatever happened was wrong and under what basis it is wrong. I did so by

citing documents from several human rights organizations.

Regarding my citations, I used footnotes to better organize my project since my writing

was getting too long for in-text citations. I believe I could have done a better job at expanding on

the information I retrieved from sources. Overall, by writing about the treatment of Sikhs in

India, I hope to have educated my audience about the importance of the issue.

Out of all the three major projects, I enjoyed completing the Genre project the most, since

I loved reading books as a kid in elementary school. While completing each page, I made sure to

put emphasis on the images as my audience was intended to be First to Third Grade level

readers. In order to do so, I had to ensure that the length of my writing was not too long which

would bore the reader. I also included a sport such as Soccer since kids of the ages 8-10 usually

like sports. Since most children’s books convey messages or themes, I made sure my book did

too. The message of my book was that even though one may appear different, they may be much

similar to you than you think.Overall, writing the genre project was very fun and something I

truly enjoyed.