Within my portfolio I incorporated pieces that best demonstrated my growth as a reader and writer. Not only my growth, but I also chose to include the works that also illustrated my strengths within those categories. The first ever essay that we’ve written in this course was the Opinion Editorial. I’ve genuinely never written an Opinion Editorial, therefore, it was very new to me as it probably was to many others. My very first draft was not perfect but one of my strengths was summarizing/paraphrasing the readings and interviews that I conducted for my writing piece. For instance, I utilized a source that spoke about a personal anecdote to strengthen my argument which was why college should be free. Additionally, within my first draft, I was able to embed quotes correctly and make my writing sound smooth and easy to comprehend.  However, one of the misconceptions regarding my writing was the fact that I waited too long to introduce my argument. I ended up delaying my stance since I was rambling too much about why college should be free and that could’ve caused some confusion for the audience. To add on, another one of the mistakes that I committed was as I attempted to offer some methods and strategies to be considered so that college can be made tuition free, I actually ended up introducing an entirely new argument. I contradicted my own argument just because I failed to write the paragraph in a certain way. To repair that, I reworded my paragraph in my edited final draft. Instead of saying that “perhaps college can not be made tuition-free” and then proceeded to give alternative solutions against my stance, I instead mentioned how even though college being tuition free is not a simple process, there are some things that can occur while the plan of making colleges tuition-free are in place. After having written this essay, as a reader and writer I acknowledged how to introduce my argument more clearly and earlier, how to properly word my sentences and how to not contradict myself. I still had room for improvement though. If I had the chance I would’ve worked on analyzing my stance and including more of my own input on the subject rather than summarizing as much. 

  Moving forward, the following piece that I worked on was the visual essay which was Essay number two. For this piece I did not edit my reflection and self-evaluation, however, I did revise and edit the visual piece itself. My visual essay was regarding the stance of my first essay which was that college should be converted tuition-free. For this visual essay, I decided on doing a subway ad as the genre which was successfully stated in my reflection. Everything that you see in my visual essay has a purpose for it. I didn’t have to do too much to my visual essay. I just came to the realization that my first draft of my visual essay had too much wording on it. For a subway ad, you certainly don’t want a wordy image because people will not have enough time to read it while they walk by or just won’t read it at all. Therefore, for my final draft of the visual part of the essay I ended up removing a quote that I included to make it more simple while still getting my point across. Moving forward with my self-evaluation essay, I did a decent job at dissecting my visual essay and analyzing everything from why I chose the genre in the first place, to the diction, and the images. To exemplify, I stated that I chose subway ad as the genre because “a large quantity of people take the subway, such as college students” and that’s because most of them are on a budget to try and keep up with the expenses. Another example of a good analysis that I provided is that as for diction I intended to use truncated sentences to make my ad a quick and simple thing to look at. Considering that people are in a hurry and wouldn’t want to stop and read an entire paragraph. I was also able to successfully state who the audience was, which was college students or students who are planning on attending it. The medium was also included within the self evaluation. The way that my subway ad was going to be delivered was well, in a subway. Something that I certainly wish I would’ve worked on was to further discuss what actions I wanted my targeted audience to take by seeing my image. Overall, this was one of the best pieces that I have composed considering that I received an A plus and I also noticed that my skills on analysis from my first essay compared to this one has improved by doing more of the “how” and “why” rather than the “what” as much.

My last and final essay is the Critical Essay (Essay number 3). This was probably the hardest essay that I have written since it’s primarily based only on analyses. I always tend to summarize everything no matter how hard I try to analyze texts. I’m currently working on improving it but after a very informative and helpful discussion with my professor I can say that I was able to understand exactly what I need to do. In terms of my only strength, it was discovering credible sources online. I  searched for websites that pertained to my particular topics. Yet, I did my best to try and find credible sources such as: people that conducted studies and people that have experienced it themselves because it’s good to hear a person reflect on what they went through to use it as a primary source. As for areas that I can improve there are many to speak on. To begin with, I implemented a passive voice into many of my sentences. I now understand that in the sentence the subject must act upon its verb and not the other way around. Furthermore, the part that I got the most points taken away from was the fact that I did not really connect the other sources I utilized to my primary source. I must speak on how it relates to my primary topic; whether my sources go against or support it. Furthermore, instead of summarizing the text throughout the entire paragraph, I should instead shift my focus on what the argument is, how the author is making the argument, what rhetorical moves did the author use, etc. This was the piece of work in which I learned the most from and it truly helped me into understanding how to analyze texts in all aspects.

Not only did my writing pieces have major improvement; my discussion posts have improved tremendously regarding including the elements of a rhetorical analysis. I uploaded one of the first discussion posts that I did in this course named “The Rhetorical Situation.”. I was supposed to choose an Op-Ed to write a rhetorical analysis on. Additionally, I was required to include the author’s purpose, genre, tone, etc. However, now that I had time to reflect I now see that I was only summarizing the text. Yes, I embedded my textual evidence but the important components like the rhetorical analysis and such weren’t spoken of.  Aside from this discussion post, I also uploaded one of my most recent discussion posts to show my improvements over the last few months. In the most recent discussion posts I was required to do the same thing as the first discussion post for an article named “ ‘Asian-Americans Are Being Attacked. Why Are Hate Crime Charges So Rare?’ ” But this time I actually fulfilled the requirements. I can say I proudly spoke of the author, audience, the author’s “central argument” which was “ that these attacks were no “‘random attacks’” and these crimes need to be called by what they are and that’s “‘hate crimes’’” and the tone in which I analyzed the reason it was chosen. I stated “By utilizing an outspoken and calm tone the authors were able to successfully get their point across without disrespecting anyone and making it easier to understand.” As a result my analysis skills have definitely grown. Not to its full potential because like for everything else there’s always room for improvement and you can never be too good at something. 

In conclusion, after having completed this course and completed many pieces of work, it has totally changed my perspective of what writing really is. To me, writing can be perceived as one leading the reader to different thoughts and ideas. One can do so by starting with reliable information and then making surprising inferences and valid connections. It can lead the reader to a deeper understanding of some other person. To sum up, writing is capable of taking the reader to a deeper understanding of one’s own, or someone else’s reasoning.