December 2, 2013 Dear Reader, Welcome to my portfolio!

My name is Alejandra De La Torre and I would like to present to you my two main achievements in English 114A. My first essay from Progression 2 is entitled Womens Rights? which deals with unequal gender rights. The reason I chose this essay is to get more informed on the fact that, even nowadays, women still dont have the same privileges men do. The title itself is a questionable phrase asking if women had equal rights as men do. I feel very strongly about this issue because I myself am a female and I would hate to be discriminated because of my gender or race. I believe the strength in the essay has to be my evidence from my research. When it came to revising my essay, most of my corrections dealt with citing the author with the page number correctly and grammatical errors. An additional editorial change that was necessary was to omit a couple of statements that hurt my argument. My second essay for my portfolio is my final essay from Progression 3 entitled National Debt Crisis: What Really Happened? This essay discusses the significant causes that began the National Debt Crisis our country is facing. However, I also include some possible solutions to improve our economy like my example on raising taxes on the rich. As a business major, I was glad I chose this topic because in order to get informed on the topic I watched a documentary, 10 Trillion and Counting. Basically it explained what mistakes were made by former presidentswhich made our country have a National Debt Crisis-and it informed me how our economy works. I honestly think my strength in this essay has to be my evidence I obtained from all my research. My main weakness on my essay is not introducing my sources or explaining them with credibility to strengthen my argument. Other weaknesses in my essay have to be a few grammatical errors, compared to my other essay. As I began this class in August, I honestly didnt know how I was going to survive this class. Over the course I started to see how all the three exercises before the essays helped flourish some ideas for an essay. I have become more familiar with MLA format and citations thanks to this class. Even though it has only been a semester, I have improved as a writer and as a person. I feel as if I know how to argue my point and prove my argument. As a writer I hope to learn from my previous mistakes and try not to repeat them. The different handouts given in class by the instructor really helped to improve my writing. Some handouts are the examples of assignments, transitional words handout, and reorganizing sentences in a paragraph worksheet. After not writing for so long during the summer, I felt as if I had forgotten everything I had learned from my English classes in high school. However, I will be ready to make more improvements in my writing during second semester. I know I still have improvements to make in my writing because I do want to get to that A level. As my letter comes to an end, I hope you enjoyed reading my essays and notice the improvements I have mentioned. I would also like to thank you for taking the time to read my portfolio. I hope you enjoyed reading my work as much as I enjoyed writing them throughout the semester. Sincerely, Alejandra De La Torre