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Erin Smith-Soeten
Professor Beadle
English 115
02 December 2019
Portfolio Reflection
Throughout this semester I have grown as a writer in many ways. Thanks to this class I
was able to hoan in on my ability to specify my thesis and tie it to the argument I was writing
about. From all three essays I learned something new every time. My essays have improved
immensely since the beginning of this semester just from having the amazing feedback from this
class in addition to the feedback I received from the LRC on campus. Rather than focusing on
the negatives of the essay the feedback was posed more as a question into how I can improve and
grow as a writer.
The first essay that we wrote, Project Space, I specifically learned how to state my claim
while also providing contextual evidence to support my argument. In addition to expanding on
why my one of the articles evidence was superior to the other two. In this essay at first I
struggled with having a solid concrete thesis. In my revision I was able to tie in my evidence to
better support my thesis. I am now able to distinctly back up each aspect of my thesis since this
essay I had to use evidence from all three essays to prove and disprove the use of ethos pathos
and logos of which article I thought was the strongest and why. My ability to connect and tie in
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my thesis and argument to prove my point throughout the essay has improved rather than just
providing evidence and not backing it up with support and explanation.
The second essay we wrote was Project Text where we analyzed The Metamorphosis by
Franz Kafka. From this essay I learned how to better explain my rebuttal and refutation to better
support my argument in my thesis. I also learned how to provide evidence from a text to better
support my claim in different facets. In my first draft of this essay I was more repetitive of the
main ideas within my essay and didn't truly elaborate on the point I was trying to prove from
each piece of evidence. I edited this so that there is both examples from the novel in addition to
itside evidnecthat more specifically backs up the claim of each claim about the book. This
elevated my essay with grater diction since I was less repetitive and had a greater range of
vocabulary when describing each piece of evidence and analyzing the novel.
The third paper we did was project media where we analyzed a visual text of our
choosing. I chose to visually analyze the branding of Moxi roller skates and how the choose to
promote themselves and why. I choose a specific post from their instagram then analyzed the
symbolism behind it with its string representation of the company. From this paper I took
everything I had learned this semester and used it to better my final writing. I was able to
sharpen my ability to be concise in my paper and keeping a clear road map with my thesis
throughout my whole paper. By this final paper I strengthened my cohesiveness through the
whole paper in answering the prompt clearly and with enough detail to back up my thesis.
In conclusion from this class I have learned how to have a stringer paper in total. In
addition to learning about the resources available on campus to get feedback and support when
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writing a paper. Overall I have improved greatly from this class as a writer. Im very thankful for
this class and the skills and knowledge I have gained from it.