E-PORTFOLIO

MY E-PORTFOLIO

My Cover Letter to Dr. Kyburz

Writing. Everyone has a different opinion about writing. I, on the other hand, love free writing, but when it comes to writing a paper, I hate it. I like to free write because I don't have to worry about grammar or not making sense. I could just write about what I think about, but in formal papers I have to be careful with word choice and punctuation, which is something I struggle with. When writing essays, I sometimes overthink the way I am writing something, so it takes me longer to write a paper. But when I free write, it helps me organize my thoughts. I will continue to practice writing and use the stuff I learned in College Writing 2 to improve my writing in the future.

I learned a lot in College Writing 2, that I can proudly say I have improved my writing skills in many ways. We wrote four types of papers: microtheme, summary, summary and rhetorical analysis, and rational argument. I struggled writing all of my papers, but I always got help from either my professor or my classmates. Writing drafts honestly helps so much to finish with a great final copy. Each draft that I have written, either it was four drafts or five, they helped me improve for my last final copy. Peer reviews are another plus. Getting feed back from my classmates helped me focus and think about what my paper still needs work on. My professor on some of my writing assignments let us revise our final papers if they needed extra revision. With revision, all you need is time.

Time is a big key in writing. Managing your time on writing a paper honestly helps a lot. This is a very important thing that I learned from my professor. She would always give us so much time to write drafts and eventually write a great paper. In the beginning of the year I would honestly leave everything to the last minute, which didn't help much. I would freak out and struggle on what to write. After the first assignment I realized that I need to start writing my papers earlier and not the night before. Even though sometimes we all do this, our papers sound much better when they are written earlier.

My professor finally made me understand attributive tags! I never really understood why we needed them or how to use them until this semester. Now that I actually understand them, they have helped me a lot when I wrote my papers and especially in this class. Another thing that I have learned was about citing. Not every website that cites for you are correct. My professor gave us an amazing website, Purdue Online Writing Lab, which shows you all different types of ways to cite. Purdue Owl has helped me a lot this semester, not just for my writing class but for other classes too.

My favorite paper was the summary and rhetorical analysis one. It was my favorite one because I actually was interested in what I was going to write about and wanted to write it. In grammar school and high school, we usually had an assigned topic to write about. Not always did I like what my teachers picked for me, but I still had to do it. Now, in college I got to pick what I like to write about and interests me, and I like that. My paper was about a study in a university to help prevent violence on campuses. This topic doesn't just affect that university in particular, but all universities around the world. I picked this article because it was something I wanted to learn more about. I started off writing a summary about the article I picked, which was my first draft. After writing another draft and another draft, etc, I finally ended with really great paper. Like I said before, you just need to give it time.

Everyone is a writer in their own unique way. So keep on writing :)