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Dionna L Bright Professor Ingram - ENGL 1101 Portfolio Essay 30 July 2013 Portfolio Essay My portfolio starts off with an Intro page that introduces you to the title of my Weebly and it also gives you a little summary about what my E-Portfolio represents and works that will be included. My next tab on my Weebly is my Portfolio Essay and this page includes my second draft of my portfolio essay, my feedback from my first and second drafts of the portfolio essay and my final draft of my portfolio essay. My next page of my blog which just so happens to be my favorite page, contains works from my Literacy Narrative. Since it was the assignment that I think shows much of my growth from English 1101 I included brainstorming and notebook content, feedback from my peers and teacher and also my final draft on this page. The Blog post number one was the first English writing assignment that my classmates and I received in English 1101. It was an experience for me because I had never had a blog before and I had to set one up for this class. My first blog post was named Writing and Inquiry From My Perspective I had only had three days of class and I could already see many differences between high school and college. One thing that I thought was interesting when I first made this blog post was one of the Key Concepts on the syllabus which was intellectual growth and maturity. I asked the teacher When referring to growth and maturity do you mean growth and maturity from reading about others take on writing or growth and maturity as far as my own writing? Based on these four weeks of school I have the answer: both. When I first came to this

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class I had the mindset of requirements, guidelines, and direction when it comes to writing. I pointed this out in my first reading response I said I spent my middle school and high school years writing papers that were predominately factual, formal, and highly informational. Ive always been used to receiving a lot of feedback from my English teachers and I appreciated the structure and direction because I knew exactly what the teachers were looking for and what I needed to do and follow in order to get an A. My first day in English genuinely made me anxious and scared about college English 1101 because of the little direction that would be given for writing assignments. Many thoughts went through my mind that first day of English like I need direction, what am I going to do? What topics will I write about? How am I going to survive this class? I was truly anxious to the point to where I was tearing up after the class. Little did I know that doing the reading responses, blog posts and narrative assignments would surprise me and lead me to appreciate free writing and less direction. As a writer I personally have grown and matured through language and mindset. I am able to explore things that I dont know about writing and I am also able to try new things and take new risks when it comes to writing. One risk that was a challenge for me throughout this class was adding dialogue into my papers. My first major college writing assignment was the literacy narrative. I chose to write about my cultural literacy experience of going to New York the spring break of 2013. A result of my first peer workshop was many feedback from my peers saying to incorporate more dialogue into my narrative. I had responses like No dialogue? and Add a little more dialogue. I was surprised that my peers wanted to know what I said or what the people around me said while I was NY. This scared me because I had not ever really incorporated dialogue into any of my papers but I set this as a goal for my next major paper which was the midterm assignment. In my midterm I decided to take the risk and add dialogue to my paper. In my paper I talked about how

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in high school I we got grades for everything and if we didnt get grades as students we would whine and not see the point of an assignment. The dialogue I added portrayed my point better by telling the reader what my friends and I actually said when we didnt get graded on work in high school. This excerpt is from my midterm and shows you how my midterm reached a level that my narrative didnt because of the dialogue: High schoolers love grades so when this happened me and my friends would complain saying things like gosh, we did all this work and shes not even going to grade it and other things like Becca didnt even do hers, its not fair to those who actually did the assignment to not get a grade. Wed huff and puff and whine in frustration and the teacher would tell us to stop complaining. As a result of taking that risk and adding more dialogue I got positive feedback from my teacher. I learned that taking risks is a good thing when it comes to writing because it can make your writing better and help you get good feedback. Using dialogue in my midterm shows me personally how Ive become a better writer. I know that if I keep using dialogue itll keep my writing interesting to whatever audience Im intending it to be for. One thing that I have grown on as a writer is brainstorming. The first brainstorming activity that we did in class was the for the literacy narrative. We learned about the rhetoric triangle and used that as a tool to brainstorm of our high school moments that we considered some form of literacy. We created timelines in our notebooks. This was a great brainstorming activity for me because it showed me how brainstorming before writing gives me a lot more ideas. When I thought about my literacy narrative I did not really know what my topic was going to be about. Once we brainstormed I had to put my mind to work and think of my high school moments that could have related to some form of literacy. I began thinking and was surprised by

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the amount of ideas that I came up with. All of a sudden I had many ideas and topics to choose for my literacy narrative. I realized that brainstorming before can help me with my assignments. I view the literacy narrative and midterm assignments as growth of my writing. I know that I deserve an A in this class because I have grown tremendously from that first day of English 1101. Im always going to use the Literacy Narrative assignment as a thought when I do writing assignments in the future. The literacy narrative taught me how to take risks by using dialogue, how to brainstorm, and how to do an assignment without the restrictions, structure and guidelines that came with high school writing.