Dear Tom, In regards of the revision for the portfolio assignment, I chose to revise my critical autobiography. I chose to revise this document because I see it as one that offers a decent chance for improvement. With that being said, it was the first essay that Thad ever written at the college level and during that time I found myself to still be writing at a high schools standards. I Feel Thave improved greatly as a writer over the semester and revising this assignment would allow me to prove how much better of a writer I have become.
Some changes that I have made to this document are for example, strengthening the rhetorical appeals, cutting out sentences that were not useful, and also making the essay more direct. This shows my development as a conscious writer because I was able to take comments that I received and put them into action. Not only that, I was able to read over my essay and catch mistakes that I did not see when I first submitted this assignment in the beginning of the semester. In these final revisions I thought | was good at being able to better specify certain problems to make my argument more understandable.
Also I thought I was efficiently able to re-read the essay and find sentences that did not have to be in the essay because they were either repeater, or not specifically relevant to the topic. I would have liked to spent more time on the rhetorical appeals. This is because they are a major part of the essay and there are still some areas that could use improvement given this aspect. In the beginning of the semester I considered myself to be strong academically, but I still saw improvement as the semester progressed.
Before college I was content with being an average student, receiving A’s and B’s on assignments, but now I seem to be disappointed when I receive average grades because I feel that I could have done better. At the beginning of this course, my writing was still at a high school level, not that it was bad, but it was not at the college standards like I wanted it to be. Throughout the progression of this course, my entire writing style changed, I started to use better grammar, have better rhetorical writing skills, and have an overall better approach to writing.
This in turn improved my writing skills and put them at the college level where I wanted to be, allowing me to achieve the grades that I strived for. The process of drafting and revising essays in this class has largely affected both the way I write and the quality of work that I am able to produce. From the drafting process I was able to catch mistakes that I may have made early on and am able to read over and fix them for the final submission. Revising my papers has also had an effect on my writing style.
For example, the workshops that we do in this class help me receive feedback from the reader allowing me to fix the essay and make it more appropriate for the audience. This allows me to improve the overall quality and better the essay as a whole. Once again, this process allowed me to transition from writing a high school level paper, to writing at the college level. This also relates to one of the course objectives because these strategies have helped me improve organization throughout my papers and improved the quality of the work that I submit.
Awareness of rhetorical terminology has change my assignments for the better. I have learned how to make my essays more appealing to the audience, while at the same time providing credibility to back them up. I have learned how to use ethos, pathos, and logos in different types of papers for different situations, whether it is making an essay sad, exciting, believable, or true. Being aware of when to use certain rhetorical appeals has improved my work as a writer and has helped me become the writer I am striving to be. With this being said, college has had a huge impact on the ways that I have improved as a writer.
I now have a more efficient system of planning and write multiple drafts before I feel at ease with submitting an assignment. Not only that, I now feel confident when writing papers and am able to complete assignments with little or no writers block. Although, writing in college has not been the easiest. It took me a while to transition to this level of writing and took a lot of hard work to get to where I am at now. Sometimes, I find myself over reviewing an assignment before I actually turn it in. Not that this is bad, but at times it takes me longer to submit an assignment than it should.
I believe that I have met the requirements that the class has required. I have accomplished, or improved on, most of the objectives that this course states, which in all has improved my skills as a writer. With that being said, I have accomplished the task of being able to incorporate the rhetorical appeals throughout my work and have transitioned to a style of writing that is more appropriate at the college level. All in all, I have improved greatly throughout the course of this class and it has helped me develop the writing skills that I will need for classes in the future. Sinc Donald Hill Jr.