Hi, I am Conner Smith and this is my reflective ePortfolio for my skills in the areas of WOVE (written, oral, visual, and electronic). In the upper right of the screen are the links to navigate this ePortfolio. About Me has some information about me, the author. Written has a paper I revised and I talk about why I revised it relating to my writing skills. Oral/Visual contains some of my best uses of oral/visual writing skills. Electronic is a reflection of the benefits of making this ePortfolio electronically. Reflection contains my at the time reflections over each paper. The last link is the link to the final submission. The purpose of this ePortfolio is to showcase how my writing skills have developed over this semester.
So as far as WOVE, I have had great areas of growth over this semester. English has never been my strongest subject area, but I think my skills have greatly improved. Not only have I changed how I write my papers, I think the overall quality of my writing has increased. Directly from paper to paper, I have improved my writing process, content coverage, and my paragraph structures.
My writing process for writing papers used to be really inconsistent. I might take a bunch of stops in between my periods of time writing. I would keep taking breaks until I ended up writing my paper in a bunch of smaller sections. This sometimes would make my papers sound choppy or have rough transitional sections. I started trying to write my papers in a smaller number of sittings. I think this is improving the quality of my papers and causes the paragraphs to flow better.
I also think that my content coverage has become broader this semester. I used to try and stick to topics that I had some background knowledge on and was more comfortable talking about. Then this semester we did the ironic analysis group project and our group talked about the pay wage gap. I was in charge of making the presentation for our group. I included the link to that presentation at the bottom of this page. On slides five and six I had to poke fun at an actual political issue I normally wouldn’t have talked about because I didn’t have as much of a background knowledge on it. I think this was a good experience because I learned that sometimes it’s actually better to expand my horizons and present on something I normally wouldn’t have. Additionally it expanded my skills in the electronic and visual portions of WOVE. I have included a link to the ironic analysis at the bottom of this page.
The third thing that I think I’ve improved on is my paragraph structuring skills. This is the first paragraph of my “Against School” Summary.
Gatto starts out by trying to think out loud of a way to fix the problem with schools. Once he can’t think of a solution to fix schools, he realizes that possibly that’s just the way schools are. Schools can’t be fixed. Then he says, “Do we really need school?” (116). There are many people who are homeschooled and can learn the same information. Many past American leaders, inventers, and scholars never went to a secondary school. Maybe people could be self-taught without the need for a structured public-school system.
While this paragraph is okay, I say a lot and I don’t really get my point across. I go more in depth and change this paragraph in the written portion of my ePortfolio, but the main point is that when I stopped trying to talk about what he was thinking I was able to more accurately describe what he was saying. By sticking to just the needed facts, the paragraph flowed better and made a lot more sense.
Through writing process, content coverage, and paragraph structuring I have improved as a writer this semester. This is evident by looking at my writing as it progressed throughout the semester. I think that going forward I will try and keep using the skills I learned in this class. Even though I’m not going into writing as a major, it will be useful for technical lab writings I will have to make. Additionally the hard work and effort I put in towards this class will always be a universal skill.