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James 1 Tiffany James Dr.

Godwin Senior Portfolio 18 November 2013 A Glimpse into My Life It all began three short years ago on a dark Tuesday morning when I walked into English Composition II. I had my first day of college classes under my belt, but to be honest I was still nervous. I had placed out of Composition I and my grade for both classes depended on how well I did in Composition II. At the time my goal coming into college was to improve myself and to figure out what I really wanted to do with my life. I knew I was competent when it came to English classes because in high school I always managed a B average on papers, but I still lacked many skills that are needed to be a great and well accomplished writer. During my time in Composition II I read many short stories and acquired the knowledge of how to write short essays on different topics surrounding those stories. The class was also required to think outside the box and to develop ideas and write papers on topics about events going on in the world at that time. This taught me to dig deeper within myself and to work harder. At times students in the class were put into small groups to talk about what we read outside of class or something the professor had given us to read in class. This was particularly difficult for me because I do not like to work in groups, and at the time I was deathly afraid of having to talk to other people or in front of a group of people. However, this taught me that I would have to share my ideas and listen to others ideas on a certain topic.

James 2 While in class I also learned that when writing a paper I could not just use the topic of the paper as the title, but that I had to come up with a title that was creative but also related back to the topic, so that the reader would know what the paper was going to be about. The professor also took the time to refresh the classs memories about how to use MLA parenthetical citation and MLA works cited because most students come out of high school with a very poor grasps on how to actually cite work correctly in their papers. I know this for a fact because I was one of those students. While in high school I understood what to do on a vague scale and I could slide by, but after entering college I actually took the time to learn how to cite properly. The miniature text that all students are required to buy as freshmen helped me immensely while trying to cite from different types of mediums like websites and journal articles compared to just citing from a book. The class also learned that you cannot have a floating quotation, which is where the quote is just sitting in a paragraph and has no introduction words before it. Overall, the class made sure I knew the basics of how to articulate my thoughts on paper in a proper fashion. Composition II was the only English class I took my freshman year, nevertheless it made an enormous impact on how I wrote my papers for the other classes I took that year. I took into account what I was writing and how I was writing so that the reader would understand the point of the paper after reading it. Eventually, the fall semester of my sophomore year rolled around and I was registered to take the English Grammar and Structure course. Out of all the courses I had already taken and the course I knew I had to take this course scared me the most because I am not a lover of grammar and in my opinion I am not good at grammar. I have never been good at understanding when you should a comma, a semi colon, or a colon. I felt that I was not prepared to take this

James 3 class and I was praying that I would at least pass the class with a high enough grade where I did not have to take it again. When the year started things seemed like they would be all right, the diagrams I was required to complete did not seem to be that difficult. The class started off with simple sentences and gradually increased the difficulty of what we were learning. The professor and the textbook started off teaching the class about grammar topics we already knew, but in an advanced way because we had never diagramed sentences this way before. I mean my teachers in high school attempted to teach my classes how to diagram sentences and break sentences apart, but for some reason the lessons never clicked and I just did not understand how to complete them. I was surprised when the sentence diagramming that was required in and out of class seemed to make some sense. However, I turned out to be terribly wrong. I thought I understood how to dissect and diagram the sentences, but in actuality I had no clue what I was doing and my first test proved that to me. I continued on in the class and I assumed if I tried harder and asked more questions in class about the diagrams then I would do better on the next test. I made an effort to understand what gerunds are and an effort to be able to tell the difference between an objective clause, a noun clause, and a subordinate clause. By the time the next test came around I figured I was ready, well I was not ready and once again my test reflected my poor understanding of what I was learning. At this point I was feed up and frustrated about this class and so I started going to the professor for help. To be honest I should have went to the professor to begin with and I could have avoided doing so poorly on the tests before. But I did not and so all I could do was grasp

James 4 the concepts that the professor taught us over the rest of the semester. I believe that I did start to understand what the professor was teaching because I started doing remarkably better on my tests. While in the class I was also required to take vocabulary test. The teacher would give us a list of words and every two weeks we would have a test on their definitions. I was pretty good at the vocabulary tests because I am good at memorization. Even though I do not remember many of the words I learned back then, I am sure learning them made a difference in how I wrote my papers because I would stop and think can I use a different word here instead of repeating that word throughout the whole paper. The diagramming we did in class taught me to think about my sentence structure and if the sentence itself made sense. At that time I was also taking Introduction to Literature where I learned the basics of how to look at and analyze literature. The class started off with a list of vocabulary words of basic terms that all English students need to know such as alliteration and couplet. The class also looked at different types of verses. The vocabulary that I learned in class was taken and then used to help me understand what I was reading and how to be more descriptive while writing papers for the class. Without this class as a refresher course I would not have been able to comprehend what I needed to do in other classs as well as I have over the years. During the spring semester I took Shakespeare: The Comedies/ Histories which covered several historical plays about kings of England and several comedies that would later bring about many new and adventurous ideas for stories. The class was required to read chapters out of The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents. This book helped

James 5 explain about the time period in which Shakespeare wrote his plays and the different details that went into actually putting on a play during his time. The class talked about the fact that plays were put on in theaters with poor lighting due to being an open theater and dirty surroundings. The fact that all characters were played by men even female parts which could end up being quite tricky. The class looked at how Shakespeare played around with gender and built up to throughout several of his plays. For example, in the play Twelfth Night or What you Will, the main character Viola who is played by a man during Shakespeares time, pretends to be a man to save herself. Here you have a man playing a woman pretending to be a man; this put a whole new spin on gender roles and how society looked at them. While looking at comedies the class also looked at how most of Shakespeare works were based on works that already existed. For example, his play The Comedy of Errors, is based on an older story about two twin brothers who were separated as babies and later end up in the same town as adults. However, Shakespeare put a twist on his version and instead of just having to two twin brothers there is also a pair of twin brothers who are servants to the other pair of twins who also know nothing of each other. What Shakespeare has done here is called copious, imitating someone elses work. Back then it was considered an honor to have someone copy your work, this is why most works from the time are based around another story plot. During the history plays portion of the class we also looked at how Shakespeare took events that happened in history and made them into plays and why they were so popular at the time. Like his plays Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, and Henry IV, Part 2. With these plays I learned that a majority of the stories written by Shakespeare are not happy ones weather they are

James 6 originals of his own creation or copies of someone elses work; and that out of all of the plays he wrote, only two of them are completely his own. That spring I was also taking World Authors, which I would later learn that the information I gained in that class would come in handy for the rest of my courses. I did not understand at first that the class was not going to focus on literature from all around the world, but on literature from just the western culture. While in class we read several stories many of them epics from Europe, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Aeneas, Don Quixote, and Dantes Inferno. In class I learned that an epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. We looked at major works that impacted western culture by helping to shape what authors wrote about and how they wrote it. This class has helped me to understand where the idea of the hero comes from. The hero is a figure of heroic stature, of national importance, or international prominence, and of great historical or legendary significance. It also helped me understand that there are certain characteristics that a poem must have to be considered an epic poem. A few of those characteristics are that the setting of the story can be vast in scope covering several great nations, and that supernatural forces interest themselves in the action and intervene from time to time like in the Iliad when the god Apollo plays favorites and supports the Trojans while the god Athena supports the Greeks. This class taught me much about epic poems and what is need for a story to be considered an epic.

James 7 In the fall of my junior year of college I took Film Appreciation. Just about all of the courses offered in the English department are based around literature and writing about it, but for a change I received the chance to take the skills I had learned in my earlier classes and apply them to writing about films from different cultures from all over the world. I figured that a class based around films would be an easy class, but boy was I wrong. I had under estimated the importance of film in society and culture. The first movie we watched was The Gold Rush a silent movie starring Charlie Chaplin. Before this movie I had no clue who he was or what he had contributed to American culture. However, I learned that Chaplin helped to usher in an age of comedy on film. The class then watched a German murder movie that put a whole new spin on creepy. The movie was based around the theme of a man who kidnaps and kills young girls. However, it is not the story plot that makes the movie memorable, but the different camera shots and angles. For example, the movie had wide shots, mid shots, and close ups. Another movie we watched called Citizen Kane also dealt with camera shots and angles like eye-level, high angle, low angle, and birds eye. We also looked at certain ways of lighting such as base light, front lighting, and background lighting. We also looked at the movie Tsotsi and how certain aspects of the movie were different due to the culture shift because the movie was set and filmed in South Africa. The movie amplifies the differences between the poor and the rich and African culture and Western culture. I also took Survey of English Literature II that semester. This class took me back to all of the classic poets and writers that I had read and heard about throughout my schooling career. We

James 8 started off with the obvious poet William Wordsworth and his pastoral poems such as We Wonder Lonely as a Cloud. This got the class talking about what pastoral poems which are poems that focus on nature. Thats what the Romantic Period of literature was all about; poets of the time focused on writing literature that praised nature and all of the living and non living things in it. This helped me to understand that a shift happened between the Romantic Period and the Victorian Age, which was that society had moved away from nature and its simplicity and had started focusing on industrial things. The class also helped me to understand how women writers were treated during the time period, which can be seen in Jane Austens letters that we read. In the spring I enrolled in Ecopoetry, which is a class that analyzes poems that talk about nature and how it is wasting away and what humanity can do to fix it. In class we read a book called Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems. The book is a mixture of different pieces of work relating to nature being analyzed by Mr. John Felstiner. This class caused me to realize that different aspects of different classes overlap, such as reading poems by William Wordsworth and William Blake because they both wrote nature related poems. In class we had to take poems and analyze them and explain why they were eco-poems. This task was not exactly easy when the class had to work in groups to analyze, explain, and present to several authors who were visiting the school, why some of their works could be considered eco-poetry. This tested my skills and patients because I personally do not like to work in groups, but sometimes you have to do things that make you feel uncomfortable to grow as a person and I feel that this situation did just that.

James 9 American Literature I was also on my list of courses to take that semester. The course focused on literature written by and / or about Americans / America. It was also an oral intensive course so I was required to give three speeches throughout the course of the semester, along with writing outlines for the speeches and papers on topics related to what we talked about in class. We read works by well known figures like Benjamin Franklin to not so well known authors like William Cullen Bryant. I learned to get over myself and to get up in front of the class and to give my presentation. I feel as if I am going to go to law school and become a lawyer I need to be able to face a group of people and be able to get my point across in an accurate and sophisticated way. I will also have to do research to make my case which is what I had to do in class just on a smaller scale. While in the classes I am currently taking, Foundations of Criticism and Survey of English Literature I, I have applied the skills I have acquired over the past three years. In Survey of English Literature I, we have looked at poems and stories from The Middle Ages starting with Beowulf. Beowulf got the class talking about epic poems right from the start and I realized that what I had learned in World Authors could help me. I also came to realize that throughout history, writers favorite topic to write about were religious ones like The Dream of the Rood and A Book of Showings. In Foundations of Criticism we are looking at different theories and ways of looking at literature like Queer theory, Feminism, and Marxism. We have applied these theories to different poems and stories and looked at them as if we were that theorist. We have also learned how to

James 10 apply any theory to a piece of literature and see if it fits and if it does explain how it can be seen in the story. Throughout my journey through college and the English classes I took along the way, I feel as if I have gained an immense amount of knowledge. I feel as if I have become a more improved writer and person for having been in these classes and absorbing what my professors had to teach me. I hope I continue to gain more knowledge and to improve myself and my writing skills.

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