Frazin 1

Sarah Frazin
Professor Lewis
English 115
12 December 2014
Portfolio Reflection
In my English 115 class, I have experimented with a variety of types of writing.
As an English major, I always try to improve my writing. Throughout the semester, I
believe I have improved on various types of writing.
The first essay I included in my portfolio was the narrative. The piece imitated
Death is a Lady by Simon R. Green. Although I am majoring in English, my emphasis
is creative writing. Thus, this was my favorite assignment throughout the year. In the
future, I would like to be a novelist so this assignment improved what I love doing the
most.
Writing this essay was the easiest compared to the other two. This easy required
creativity rather than hard-core analysis, which made the essay enjoyable and simple.
However, I also had to imitate the style used by the author as according to the prompt.
This made it a little more difficult, but the style was easy enough to follow. My favorite
part about writing this story was the description because I always preferred the clich,
show not tell.
Overall, I believe that the narrative improved my writing the least because I write
things like these all the time. However, by practicing this genre of writing, I found my
writing style has changed a little. While in the editing process, I realized things I never
really noticed before in my creative writing, such as fragmented sentences. I knew I used

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them for the effect, but I did not realize I used them so often, which made me able to
improve my narrative style.
The essay I did not select was the second one, which was the ethnography. Of the
three essays I wrote over the semester, this one was my least favorite. I felt like this essay
was the worst one I wrote. I spent the least amount of time writing it and I did not care
much for it. The fact that I needed to question strangers for the essay gave me anxiety,
thus I procrastinated, which caused me stress. If I wanted to put the ethnography in my
portfolio, I feel like I would need to completely start from scratch to write a descent
paper.
Thus, I chose the third essay for the portfolio. This essay was a basic analytical
essay about the book we read for class, Blue Moon Rising, also by Simon R. Green. I
have been writing essays like these since middle school, so I knew exactly what I was
doing. Nevertheless, I improved upon my analysis, as that was my worst skill in writing.
Always was.
This essay was also enjoyable to write because it involved a topic I enjoy writing
about: archetypes. Ever since I learned about them in middle school, I found them
interesting to learn about. I felt like this was my best piece of writing throughout the
semester because I have written many essays like this one before.
I also decided to include my annotated bibliography and online article for my
assignments because I thought they also showed the best of my writing.
Overall, my writing during this semester has improved because of my English
class. I believed I slightly improved on my narrative and greatly improved on my analysis
paper. This portfolio, I think, shows my best writing throughout the year.