This portfolio represents the changes that learning this course of English has brought in my writings. Prior to taking UWP1, I thought that writing an essay is a simple process of organizing thoughts and writing them down neatly. It was not until the beginning of this quarter that I realized my previous concepts towards writing were very naïve. The course introduced me to a variety of essay genres such as literacy narrative, rhetoric analysis and research blog, which I had hardly touched on before. I was first terrified at the complexity of genres and speech of tones correlated with various styles of essays, but I gradually gained confidence in engaging with audience and using different approaches to develop a well-organized essay. Hopefully, as you read through my portfolio, you can sense the improvements in my critical thinking and the overall progess on the essay quality.
The first essay in the portfolio is a personal literacy narrative. I decided to include this assignment in my portfolio, because it records experiences of how I evolved, as a nonnative English speaker, to a better writer in English, and it also lays a firm basis for my further improvement in this class. The most important aspect of writing I learned from these assignments was how to effectively incorporate mental thoughts into my wrting. As an international student, I had only been exposed to essays written in a formal tone, such as those in
TOEFL and other standardized tests. As such, I did not have any clues of writing such descriptive personal narratives in the first place. In this case, my first draft was like a straightforward story of other people, instead of an emotional narration of myself. During the review session, my instructor and classmates commented on the draft and pointed out that it’s tone was too frigid and lacked a garnish of inner feelings. With the significance of “myself” in mind, I rewrote a large portion of the original draft and carefully described the process of how I improved as an ESL writer, highlighting the mental struggle I had with English writing. After repeated revisions, the essay finally seemed more intrigueing and qualified for a literary narrative.
The other assignment in the portfolio is a research blog talking about the history of water and droughts in California. I had written a research paper in a science class once before, but this is my first time writing a research paper in a blog format. I felt both excited and a little intimidated when I got the assignment topic. As a research blog, the assignment was distinct from other styles of writing with its substantial number of citations, extensive usage of sources, and heavy workloads in conducting research. I had spent plenty of time doing research on the subject of California’s history of droughts, so that I can have a sharp sense of my focus on the essay content while reading it. Amid this writing, I introduced the current water situation in Califonia, the history of drought, as well as practical solutions to potential future droughts. There were two parts that I found very difficult while constructing the essay. The first one was to control the article’s specific tone of speech---neither too formal nor too informal. Another one was to integrate a large portion of others’ works into my own work with proper attribution rather than just copy and paste. Fortunately, Professor Kling gave me some constructive criticism on the effective usage of language in my essay so as to make it more fitting into a genre of reseach blog. She also gave instructive examples on integration strategies during class; after receiving the helpful suggestions, my revisions went on without much problem. More importantly, the combination of formal and informal tones, and the practical integration techniques I learned from this assignment will certainly contribute to better research papers in other classes.
UWP1 is a pleasant opportunity for me to learn how to write different genres of essays. Here, I hope you can find the same pleasure I found in this class, as you are about to see the results of my growth over this quarter.
