If I was still in high school and was asked to put a portfolio together with two of my highest quality works, I am sure that I would have hurriedly searched through my essays and chose the two with the highest grades on them. Then bam, I'd have my two ‘best works’ and be done. I am also sure that I would never have even had second thoughts about whether or not they were truly my best works. I know that the two works that I chose were not the ones that have the two highest grades marked in the upper right corner. This class has taught me better, I now know the content of the writing itself is much more important than the grade. Also, choosing two of the highest grades would leave no room to show my improvement throughout this course.
The first piece of work that I have chosen is my Bacon's Rebellion essay, as it was the starting point to this course. It was the first actual essay that we were asked to turn in. I thought the best way to receive a high grade on the paper was to jam in as much information as I could into this paper. Boy was I wrong; all that did was hurt me more than anything. My Bacon's Rebellion essay was not a complete disaster though; I did use the templates of the "They Say/I Say" book which helped me structure my ideas and explain them with efficiency. My transitions were completely horrible and I believe that my essay was weak overall. I still received an average grade on this essay, but to me the grade didn't really matter. I wanted to know how to improve my writing, how to make it better for the reader to read. This class taught me how to do that. My second piece of work is proof to that.
The second piece of work that I chose was my writing midterm. It asked me to read a quote about learning the lessons of history, and then write about it while relating it to some even or parts of my life. I was really excited at this prompt; I knew exactly what I wanted to write about. I used some of the templates in the "They Say/I Say" book that we were given to read. These templates made my story flow so much better, and overall it made the structure of my essay much stronger. My thesis was strong and I had a great hook in the beginning. I was proud that I had greatly improved my transitions compared to those, or lack thereof, in the Bacon's Rebellion essay. I am sure that if I were to have been assigned this prompt at the beginning of the quarter, I would have approached this essay in a totally different light. It would have been another repeat of my old Bacon's Rebellion essay. Most of my strengths are shown in the mid-term such as my strong voice and how I can correctly piece information together. As the quarter continued after the midterm paper, I continued to work on my weaknesses shown in the Bacon's Rebellion paper as well as improving on my strengths.
Between writing my Bacon’s Rebellion essay and my midterm, there was tremendous growth in my writing. In the beginning of the quarter, my transitions were terrible. For example, in Bacon’s Rebellion on of my stronger transitions was, “Times change and so do ideas.” Then I went on saying, “
Interpretations change based upon time era and the views in the society during that time era.” I know that now I can actually formulate strong transitions such as one of the average transitions in my mid term that was, “Just like the old saying goes, “those who do not learn from their past will continue to make the same mistakes in the future.”” I then went on saying, “Many historians agree with that statement as well. Historian Gerda Lerner believes that history matters because she thinks that, “they often repeated saying that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them has a lot of truth to it.”” It is obvious to me that the transition in my midterm was much stronger and flowed better than the one in Bacon’s Rebellion. I could not have improved so much in this short amount of time without the help of my Writing 101 course.
Before arriving to Puget Sound Early College, I thought that this writing course would be a regular boring writing class where students only wrote for the purpose of stating information and that was as in depth that the essays went. That was how I wrote my essays up until I began doing work in this Writing 101 class. Now that I have taken this course, I have realized that writing is so much more than that. After taking the Writing 101 course I have learned that writing isn't about how well I can or cannot simply state dates or random facts into an essay, it is a conversation that is supposed to involve the reader as much as possible. Writing in a conversation is much more effective than writing a typical, five paragraph, Jane Schaffer style, essay that most students are taught in high school. This course has definitely molded me into a better writer by teaching me more effective and practical methods of writing. It not only transformed my writing, it also transformed how I approached writing.
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