PORTFOLIO; reflection letter final draft.

This quarter in writing 101, I have gained a great deal of knowledge in terms of the writing process, and the writing styles that work well in different situations. I definately think I have progressed throughout the quarter. Compared to my way of writing at the beginning of the course, I believe I have improved in many aspects of my writing. Early on in the course, I never payed a lot of attention to detail and language usage. I also began by never writing with my own point of view, and never arguing another point of view. It was difficult to move away from this because I had only learned these types of writing in my past english classes. After a couple of different writing assignments, I saw my skills improving in terms of making progress towards these new writing styles. Overall, this course has greatly helped me improve my writing skills, and I am so glad I got the opportunity to learn many more of the styles that writing has to offer.

In our first essay assignment, written about the influence of tobacco on todays society, my essay was extremely short. It did not have as much information as I could have added, and everything was very jumbled together into one big paragraph. It was also very much like a list. For example in this sentence; "...ingredients such as tar, ammonia, sodium hydroxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, and higher amounts of nicotine than in previous years are now additives and some of the main components of cigarettes." All I really did was list information and ingredients, whcih was somewhat useless information, and could have been shortened to a degree. Although this essay definately could have been greatly improved, in some aspects of the essay, I felt it had nice detail.

I believe the second essay I wrote on the topic of Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 showed slightly more progression in terms of length and detail. A lot of it, as I was soon to find out, was the wrong kind of detail. When I first began working on this essay and doing research, I found a lot of information that I believed would be great to add into my paper. Instead, it ended up being mostly informative. Such as the part when I say; "Around 1675-1676 the colonists started to expand further west. They began to fight with the Indians for the land that they both believed was theirs. I think this was unfair for the Indians. They were there first, therefore should be entitled to this land. The government tried to erase tensions between both groups." A lot of this was just unnecessary information that could easily have been overlooked or taken out. The feedback I got was that I should have had more of my opinion put into it. Overall, this assignment was somewhat rushed, and I ended up doing final revisions very last minute. This resulted in a loss of points. I definately could have made this essay a great deal better if I had spent more time editing.

In a writing assignment about loyalism and patriotism, I believe I did very well when it came to improving my research skills, and adding a lot of my own perspective. I spent a long time researching so I could gain the knowledge I believe I needed in order to make this essay better than all the rest. This definately payed off because I felt more confident about what I was writing about. Doing this also assisted me when it came to adding my own persepective and opinion because I had my own character to let those opinions flow through. This was one of the assignments that were more fun in my opinion, because we got to make up a historical character and portray them in terms of what side they were on; patriots or loyalists. A quote from my character, Nicholas Addy that I particulary loved in this essay was; "I found my son Isaac's journal this very morning. He only confirms my opinion of him being a complete fool by his writings. He says we who uphold the british government are greedy. He is the one who is greedy. Fighting against the british, who made our colonies what they are today. The patriots will never get away with this!" It was really enhoyable being able to express emotions through another character, making this piece one of my favorites to write.

When it comes to my final writing assessment, I believe I did very well. It shows a great deal of improvment when compared to our very first real assignment. For example, I feel that my language usage showed improvement. For example, in the sentence; "A major reason they did not wish to ratify was because they believed that the nation could experience a downfall due to the fear of the proposed centralized government becoming in a sense, a tyranny." I just feel as if this language compared to what I shared in my example of the first essay language definately shows great improvement. "It's amazing how tobacco was once (and still is) thought of as quite a trendy thing to do, while tobacco users never knew fully the dangers of smoking until many years later." This introduction sentence in my first essay was definately not my idea of brilliant.

All of this being said, I do believe my skills have greatly improved since the beginning of writing 101 this quarter. All of these are specific examples that show my work in terms of progression. These were all chosen for specific reasons and to show my improvement over this course. That being said, I, once again am very glad to have had the opportunity to learn from my mistakes, and improve in many aspects of my writing style.