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Alexander Miller
Professor Suzanne Ingram
English 1103 030
12/9/15
Final Portfolio Essay Draft 1
Here we go! Time to write the famous FPE. Or, in your case, read.
Youve probably already read at least 50 other essays that pretty much lead
to about the same point; I have learned so much from this class and I will
hope to utilize these valuable skills in the future to become as successful as
possible. Well, I am here to say to that I will try to lean away from that
clich. (Please note the try in that sentence) Maybe I am wrong and
nobody has written anything remotely close to that. Whatever, I am just
going to give it my best shot. Ahem. I have learned so much from this class
and I will hope to utilize these valuable skills in the future to become as
successful as possible. (Great start, right?)
Now, may I turn your attention to my e-portfolio? Beautiful, isnt it? The
starry background, the heartwarmingly, gently picture of Mickey, and the
wholesome picture of Calvin stressfully writing. This is front page of my vast,
beautiful e-portfolio. As I have already pointed out, I used the visual mode of
writing quite a lot on my homepage. This was to set a very calming, warm
mood with just a pinch of stress. I think that represents the feeling of writing

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extremely well, dont you? The layout of everything is made to be as simple
and easy as possible to navigate. The tabs are sorted in order of completion
and labeled so that the reader knows what the pages contain. My home page
is like the table of contents and cover of a book wrapped into one. I also used
the spatial mode in hopes to keep things neat and tidy as possible. For
example, in the Blog tab I tried to use as little space as I can so it does not
seem cramped but you still can understand where everything is. The page
that gave me most trouble is my Notes/Feedback page. It has a lot of
information and documents that can look a little cluttered. To help clean it up
I tried to organize everything similar into categories with labels. Making this
e-portfolio has helped a lot with learning the multi-modality of print and
digital texts. If I didnt organize how I organized my papers with my portfolio
it could have turned out to be a huge mess. Hopefully I succeeded and my eportfolio is as clean and beautiful as I have been lead to believe.
Over the course of this class I have written a lot of papers. I mean A
LOT of papers. Some might say that I wrote too many papers. But whos
complaining, right? Right? Ive got to admit, however. I have gained a lot of
experience in writing essays. From my Midterm to the Research paper I have
gained a lot of experience. Let me take the time to talk to you individually
about each of them.
My Blog

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Ahh yes, my blog. The project that we have been working on all year.
All of my blog posts are situated under the tab labeled Blog. I know, Im
proud of this piece of ingenuity as well! The individual blog posts are clearly
labeled (i.e. Blog post #1) so that the reader can see which post it is. If you
wish to read the complete blog post you must click the read more button
on the bottom of each post. Since we are now done with the blog I can say
that the purpose of it was to prepare me for my multitude of essays. To give
me ideas and a source for myself for when I am stuck or need some help
with writing. Of course, they helped out a bunch. Thats what they were
made for. Im not going to sit here and pretend that they helped substantially
but they did provide a nice backbone. For instance, in Blog Post #5 the
purpose of this was to help me understand what my sources for my Research
Paper were saying and how they are qualified to speak on the subject. I said
for my conclusion was, The three knights seem to all agree that the
portrayal of the mentally ill is not good at the moment and needs to be fixed.
They do all make some similar points but highlight different key concepts.
This helped me write about the multiple sides of the issue and try to select
the best one to write about.
Midterm
My midterm, I feel, was kind of a mini version of this very paper. We
reviewed on how we were doing in this class so far, as well as talking about
our strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, as the fantastic writer I am, had
more strengths than weaknesses. I still stand by this opinion to this day. You

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know what, its a fact. Not an opinion. But I digress. This paper gave me an
opportunity to think about what I need to work on in order to better my
writing ability, even though its practically perfect already. Everybody has
their own writing experience. Like I said in my midterm, As writers, we all
have our strengths and weaknesses. Some may be more an idea maker while
others may be a word magician. I am no different. I certainly have my very
own weaknesses and strengths. I bet this was true for even the best of
writers, such as Edgar Allen Poe or William Shakespeare. Probably not as
noticeably, though, for those two. From the last time you saw this paper I
touched it up just a little bit. Not as greatly as some of my other papers. I did
go back and try to touch up on the sentence structure and grammar, of
course. Maybe try to make the wording clearer and more profound. I didnt
do much to fix this one as I should have, to be honest. Im still happy with
the end product, however.
Exploratory Essay
This was my favorite paper to write in this class. The reason behind
this is because you let us write about anything, however we wanted. All we
had to do was stay in the lines of these words; What is your passion? I
chose to write a not very serious peace about how much of a great person I
am. I am passionate about helping people, changing the world, exploring,
etc. In reality, this is all just a huge lie because I say that my second passion
is making up stories. If you read my paper, some of the facts Im telling
you are crazy. I have been to twelve different countries and twenty-two

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different states, Is just one of the amazingly abstract things I say in this
piece. I mean just read this, The reason I can go to such wondrous places is
because my parents work for an amazing non-profit organization called
Pants for all whose goal is to give the homeless and the needy around the
world a new, stylish pair of pants. Pants for all isnt a real non-profit
organization unfortunately. Because of this, it was extremely enjoyable to
write. The purpose of this paper was to probably introduce us to the course
and to writing essays. Some people probably took this paper way more
seriously than me but I feel like I accomplished my goal anyways. Since the
last time youve seen this paper I have tried to improve it based on the
feedback I have been given. I fixed the ending to make it more clear on what
I meant by it. (That Ive been lying the whole time) It used to say just My
second passion is lying. Everybody felt that it wasnt clear enough so I
changed the ending to, My second passion is my ability to make up stories
that are, for the most part, believable One great example I can give you is
for my freshman college writing class, I wrote this very paper. I felt this
helped the reader understand the meaning of the passage a lot better.
Another way I have changed the paper was that one of the facts I talked
about was a little too unbelievable. Originally, the fact stated, The reason I
could go to the wonderful places is because my parents work for this nonprofit organization called The Coalition for a Better Yesterday. The purpose
of this organization is to make peoples yesterday a better today. I felt like
this was too much so I changed it to, my parents work for an amazing non-

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profit organization called Pants for all whose goal is to give the homeless
and the needy around the world a new, stylish pair of pants. I also fixed
some wording and grammar but this would be a pretty boring paper if I
showed every one of those fixes.

Bibliography
This probably was one of the most helpful projects that we had to
complete in this class in my opinion. My bibliography is located under the
Bibliography tab in my portfolio. Hopefully youre starting to see a trend by
now. The reason this was helpful to me was because it really helped me
organize my sources for my research paper. Instead of having to make a ton
of flashcards I just made a nice, organized chart. We had to gather our own
sources that would help us write our research paper. It was tedious at some
moments but in the end it allowed me to access the sources that I needed
when I needed them. This helped me get better at independent inquiry and
responsible for my learning. If I didnt get any quality sources I would not
have a good paper. It took time and planning to find just what you were
looking for. Not just a simple Google search. (I did use Google for some,
though. My bad) My bibliography helped greatly because if I needed to write
about how the media influences people on mental illness I could just look at
my bibliography to see which one was best for that. Same thing if I needed
to find a source for what a mental illness is, or how the mentally ill are

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treated, etc. I have all of the main sources I needed on my bibliography just
for this cause. One of the sources I had was Timeline: Treatments for Mental
Illness by Dennis Gaffney in which I said, There is a major point this movie
makes, though. Its that anybody can make it no matter your disabilities.
Mental illness isnt a major problem that can hold you back. This source
helped me out a lot because it gave me a whole timeline of how the mentally
ill have been treated which I used extensively throughout my paper. The
bibliography really helped me organize my writing process.
Research Paper
Im going to be honest. I put way more effort into this paper than any
other assignment I have ever gotten so far in college. My goodness I really
had to try. But, I get it. I did have the choice to do the Multi-Genre Project
instead but I chose not to because I felt like I needed to challenge myself. I
have less experience writing traditional essays and felt like this would be for
the best if I wanted to get the most out of this class. This adheres to my
ability to get out of my comfort zone which originally was one of my
weaknesses. The purpose of this essay is to prove that we are able to sort,
analyze, gather, and communicate ideas and put it into a paper. I get it.
Were here to learn. Originally, the topic I was planning on researching is how
FIFA, the worlds soccer governing body, has become corrupt and needs to
be punished for their actions. I later realized that this topic has few
arguments against it and not that much information I was hoping. The topic I
finally decided on was how the worlds media affects how people view the

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mentally ill. Like I said in my paper, The media has heavily influenced the
image of the mentally ill in todays society by spreading false information
about the mentally ill, sensationalizing only certain aspects of psychiatric
disorders, and devaluing people with a mental illness in society. This quote
was also my thesis statement. It was real tough writing this, for me, because
I have had trouble writing non-fiction essays in the past. I usually lose
interest and slack on writing it. I didnt slack this time and I pushed myself to
write a quality paper. Some examples on how I improved my final draft was,
for one thing, finish it. It wasnt done when I had it peer-reviewed but I did
eventually finish it. Another thing I did was that you said to clear up the
transition from quotes to text. I decided to include more annotations to keep
the essays flow going. One example of an annotation that was previously
just an awkward quote was, They are less likely to obtain a job, a higher
education, and a loan from the bank according to The Scientific American. I
also cleared up some grammar, but I also included WHAT a mentally ill
person really is, as you suggested. I didnt write 3 whole paragraphs on it but
I did try to go in depth as possible and even gave a few examples of
misconceptions on some specific mental illnesses. For example, in my paper I
said, . Schizophrenia, for example, is thought by many to cause multiple
personalities, hallucinations, and dangerous. In reality, there are multiple
different types of schizophrenia. Even though some cases of schizophrenia
do cause hallucinations, it also affects other brain functions like decision

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making, emotional management, and cause delusions. Overall, Im happy
about how it turned out!
Finally, what grade do I believe I deserve. I feel like I deserve an A. I
have put a lot of work into this class and I feel like it reflects on my papers.
They are not jumbled up messes. I actually put effort to plan, work out, and
review each paper. My e-portfolio has everything it needs and isnt an
unorganized, monstrosity. It is pretty cool if I have to say so myself. This
essay is thoughtfully quoted and has more than 3 key concepts include. After
reading this essay through one last time, the only question I have is; Are the
Panthers good enough to make it to the Super bowl?