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Braelyn N. Torres

ENGL1301102FL23

Dr. Sharity Nelson

05 December 2023

Portfolio Reflection

I learned how to better organize my essays, as well as how to use more details in my

writing. I’d say the worksheets we had to do for homework in each essay such as... “Genre

Analysis Outline Worksheet, Visual Text Analysis Outline Worksheet and the Rhetorical

Analysis Outline Worksheet”, were all a huge help organizing my essays where they didn't look

all out of place. They also helped in knowing what information to look for while trying to figure

out what the rhetorical situations were in writing my essays. Even the outline worksheets helped

with the organization of my paragraphs, they allowed for me to be able to put my examples and

explanations in order. The writing process we practiced and learned from Junior High and High

School are completely different to what we learned in the English 1301-102 class at TAMIU

(Texas A&M International University). In our English class we learned how to go more into

depth with topics we write, the professor even helped with how to structure our essays more

thoroughly. For instance when we needed to know how to build our paragraphs we could look

back at the worksheets we did and know how to organize the information we wanted to insert in

our writings.

What I learned about analysis in this course, was that it needed for us to be very open

eyed. By open eyed I mean, more attentive. We really needed to pay attention to minor details

about what we were analyzing. If we saw colors and shapes we needed to be more specific, if the

shape was a square we had to go into depth about that square; How many sides does it have, Is it
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a certain color, what can the square represent, and what parts are similar to another part.

Basically I learned how to really go into depth about the item I was writing about. An activity

that helped understand what analysis was when we had to describe an image that was presented

to us in class in great detail. We had to try to understand every detail that was in the image and

its significance to the image as a whole. This really helped me in understanding how much more

detailed things can be if we really tried to analyze them properly and try to see every detail in

them that might have a significance to the bigger picture.

Revising one of my essays one more time after turning in the final draft made me realize

how much more structured, organized and in detail I could have made the essay so much. I

noticed there were some aspects of the essay that needed some extra information so I added on to

my essay and specified what some items were. I deleted run-on sentences that didn’t need to be

in my paragraphs and I expanded on what the abbreviations mean in my essay. I also noticed that

the font and spacing was completely wrong in the final draft of my essay. So I went ahead and

fixed that part completely, as I did this I also took time in making sure my punctuation and

grammar made sense in my essay and that it could be read clearly without any hesitation. These

fixes really enhanced the quality of the essay and how it is understood by the audience. After

reviewing the essay I could see what a huge difference it made to my paper correcting these

mistakes, it really made the whole essay come together. I was able to read through the final

product so easily and was able to comprehend the information I was reading instead of being

confused on what I was even reading. I am so glad I chose to revise essay one and being able to

see the final revision really improve the way the essay looked and how it is read.

The most difficult aspect of revising my first essay’s final draft l was the actual revising I

had to do in order to fix the draft. My stubbornness didn’t allow me to believe there was
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anything more I needed to add on to my final draft, but after taking a closer inspection and

actually reading through the essay, I realized there was actually much more I could do to this

essay in order to really make it stand out. Taking my time reading it many times through and

looking for revisions I could make took me a few tries since I had to keep rereading to actually

spot a mistake. Although I was held back by my stubbornness I worked through it and was able

to make the essay look more put together and less difficult to understand. The least challenging

part I’d have to say was editing the errors I hadn’t caught before my final revision because they

stood put more now that I was coming back to them than before when I was just seeing it the

same way as before. Everything was already written out for me. I just had to tweak a few

sentences here and there in order for it to be more adequate for the reader to be able to

understand . It was very simple editing the font and spacing as well, this is why I would consider

it the least challenging part since it only consisted of rereading and spotting the mistake of not

using the right spacing which then made me realize it was the wrong font as well. Most of my

essay was already written properly so I had very few sentences that I actually had to revise one

last time in order to make it seem formally written. Many of the ones I ended up revising only

needed a few more details to make the main idea more clear; therefore I expanded these

sentences by adding on some more details supporting the topic and thesis statement. I added in

what the abbreviations stood for and I went ahead and fixed the font along with the grammar of

some of my sentences. All of it put together made the essay’s final product much more thorough

and easily understandable when reading and locating pieces of information.

Some choices I made to communicate the course concept to a general audience on my

website include; making brief summaries of each essay, stating their topic and what I wrote

about in each one. I made sure to also include details about what I learned while writing the
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essays in order to give the explanation a better description for the audience. I wrote each

summary as if to have no specific type of wanted audience and decided to use word choices that

can be inferred to be used for a broad type of readers who may be interested in what kind of

genre the essay was written about. In my unit writing assignment explanations I made the genre

analysis, visual text analysis, and rhetorical analysis understandable to someone who is

unfamiliar with these genres by; using small paragraphs briefly explaining how I used each item

I analyzed and how I analyzed the item using the genres listed above. In my genre analysis

explanation I wrote how I found the genre of the text. I stated in the explanation the details of

how the workings of a genre analysis helped me write my essay therefore giving a brief idea of

what a genre analysis is and how it works in helping the reader understand what the text is about

when doing their own genre analysis. In writing the explanation for my visual text analysis essay

I managed to go into detail in giving the audience or whomever may not be familiar with the

genre a better idea on what it is to analyze a visual text. I included in my explanation for my

visual text analysis how I learned to look at every minor detail of my visual text in order to

create my essay over my chosen item. As well as how I managed to piece together everything I

saw to create a detailed essay of each detail of the image I was seeing in the text. This helps

create the idea of how a visual text analysis is done for those who may be unfamiliar with doing

one of their own. In my rhetorical analysis explanation it was a bit more difficult to put into

words how I managed to do a rhetorical analysis in order to give someone who isn’t familiar

with the genre an understanding of what it is or how to do one. I began by giving direct details

about what a rhetorical analysis is instead of how I did mine. Afterwards I continued by writing

in the explanation how I found my source and how I chose it.

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The most challenging aspect of this course for me was definitely getting down the

expectations of the professor when it came to writing our essays. I wasn’t used to writing essays

the way Professor Sharity Nelson would request for us to write them so I had struggled a bit

before actually getting a grasp of the writing and analyzing style. It was difficult for me to

understand how to go into more detail with items I thought I already wrote down pretty well but

turned out they didn’t really make sense. I had trouble finding errors in my writing because I

didn’t even know they were errors until the conferences with the professor and the peer reviews

done by my classmates pointed out some things that needed work or a bit more attention. The

feedback from both the professor and my classmates helped overcome the challenge. I believe I

grasped a better understanding on how the essays had to be written by trying my best not to

repeat former mistakes done in previous essays and taking into account the feedback given to me

by classmates. In order to fully overcome the challenge though I definitely had to keep an eye

out in case I made the errors as before in my new essays, and with each essay I revised

differently due to my understanding of how the essay had to be written.

The least challenging aspect of this course for me was when I had to give feedback to my

classmates’ essays. I found that using peer review to give feedback to others' essays was the

easiest part of the course. I only had to read through their essays and write constructive criticism

on some aspects of their essay. If they had written run-on sentences all I would have commented

was to put less run-ons in their essay and point out where they could find some of the sentences

they had to edit. If they had sentences that were too similar to other sentences, I would comment

in the peer review of their essay that their sentence was too similar to another and so on.

I do feel as though this course has prepared me to become a part of the academic writing

community. The class in general helped me better my writing skills and my analyzing skills as
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well. So yes I do believe it has prepared me well, if it wasn’t for the class I wouldn’t have known

the different types of writing genres and how each one works. I would have continued writing

bland essays with no detail or specifics at all and I may have never revised my essays properly

before submitting them. The course has improved a lot of my writing and I have found that I am

decent at writing essays as long as I properly analyze the item I am writing about. Taking this

course has given me a different viewpoint on writing essays and the workings of analyzing

thoroughly my items before writing about them. I have learned to pay closer attention to some

details others may miss or even pay attention to every word I read in an essay and process what

parts or roles they play in being a part of the text.

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Work Cited
Braelyn Torres, “Website Portfolio-Portfolio Reflection, a reflection on our learning processof
writing analysis”, Genre Analysis Outline Worksheet, Visual Text Analysis Outline Worksheet
and the Rhetorical Analysis Outline Worksheet. December 05, 2023.