Portfolio: Reflective Letter

This quarter of Writing 101 was a very educational experience. I enjoyed having Craig as an instructor and I learned a lot of valuable information from him. The text that was required for this course was actually a very interesting and helpful aid for learning the rules and guidelines of writing well structured papers. I’m glad this program was set up the way it was because it was very helpful for me. I feel like I developed a lot of skills that I was missing in high school from this course. There is always room for improvement and although I still have some work to do, I have come a long way since my sophomore year.

My writing skills have improved quite a bit because of this course but, there are many things that I could improve on. First off, I didn’t truly capture the correct format of a hook. Like in my second essay, I started it with, “It is because of the cruel statements said and the harsh treatment received from the Patriots that I am a Rhode Island loyalist today in 1777”.Which was not a hook that would draw the reader in; instead I was just jumping right into the actual topic of the paper. Also, I had trouble constructing a well-written and straight to the point thesis for my papers. In my second essay my thesis was, “We deserve to be treated with the utmost respect and kept protected economically and with military strength; and Britain is the supporter that can meet and fulfill those requests”, which was unclear and hard to pull out my main idea for the paper. Most of my theses were vague or the reader didn't truly see the main points of my argument. So, it is clear that I have some things to improve on but I think I did well on a lot of other things throughout this writing course.

I think I did better in this writing course than any other writing class I have ever taken. I believe my writing quality has improved a lot since high school and I owe that to the “They say, I say” text book and Craig. Learning how to integrate quotes was a very important skill for this course. In my mid-term essay I integrated quotes well to show a point. For example I said, “But with the knowledge of history, people can try their hardest to not repeat history by making wise choices to help ‘determine how future events’ will play out in the end”. The book also taught about templates. The templates we had to integrate into our essays truly helped my writing quality improve. Also, by using the templates, I feel that the content of my essays was at a much higher level than compared to some of the papers I wrote in high school. For example in my second essay I said, “They passed the Test Act in 1776 that “empowered any member of the Assembly who suspected his neighbor of being unfriendly to the cause of the United American colonies, to summon such neighbor before him, and demand that he should subscribe to the Declaration” (Vernon 5), so by integrating quotes the content of my paper has grown to a new level. Before using the templates, my content was all over the place and not much of it was even useful; but now that I have templates to style my writing, the content of my papers makes sense and is very intellectual. I am proud of the way I worked throughout the quarter and I believe I did fairly well in this writing course.