Evelyn Slaught Ms.

Woodard English 10H, Period 5 December 18, 2013 Fall 2013 Reflection Letter Dear Reader, I have positive memories and experiences from my first semester of Honors English 10. I feel I have improved and gained valuable skills that will aid me in the rest of my sophomore year, as well as in the continuation of my writing career. Some of these abilities include literary analysis, vocabulary comprehension, and enhanced creative thought. The items included in my portfolio are passage analyses from poems and novels, essays, and a video demonstrating a rhetorical device. My passage analysis about the Kite Runner helped me learn about proper MLA formatting. I also employed some of my best insightful commentary. This analysis brought to my attention the importance of clear transition and the impact of insightful connections. Also an analysis, the poem Going to St. Ives challenged me to probe deeper into the meaning of the work I was reading. Since this was not a particularly long or advanced work, I originally thought I would struggle to produce something of quality. However I found I pulled out thought-provoking analysis which I can now apply whenever I read. My essay titled Enmity in Parent to Child Relationships is my most recent and perhaps the assignment I am most proud of. At first, I thought I would have a hard time relating three different literary works to each other under a common theme. I had a constant working battle concerning my thesis and hook while I wrote the main content of the paper. I knew these would be the first sentences my audience read, so I wanted to take great care in making them of high appeal. Thankfully, when I got to the end of my paper and the only thing left I had to do was write the introductory paragraph, I had a numerous amount of information to go off of. This helped me revise my writing process as well as see the value of being patient with my writing. Both the Afghanistan Project Self-Evaluation and the Hyperbole video were projects I did with Rachel Kohansamad, and in both assignments I feel confident in what I produced. I did not feel I would be able to analyze my own performance in both the research and presentation categories of our Afghanistan project. However, I found that once I began writing, examples of areas I could improve as well as things I achieved quite well became clear to me. Analyzing myself, something Ive never before done in a formal paper, helped me appreciate all the hard work put into preparing, writing, and finally finishing projects. Rachel and I collaborated and found a video that demonstrated hyperbole, which was a clip from one of our favorite movies. This not only made the project more enjoyable, but it allowed us to see the application of what we were learning to real life. The rhetorical device video made utilizing Ms. Woodards lovely daughter as a character made me excited to use creativity and our class new

technology. The work put into producing a high quality presentation and capturing the perfect version of our reenactment was all worth while because of the satisfaction felt when our works succeeded. When I first took the formative assessment at the start of the semester, I felt the summer break had swallowed all my previous knowledge of grammar and writing. From that point to now, I know I am more diverse in vocabulary knowledge, stronger in analysis, and more prepared for English classes in my future. I give myself an overall score on my Reading exhibit of a 6. I feel the entries in this catagory effectively exemplify my analytical and formatting progress. I am most proud of my attention to detail in all of these assignments. In the Writing exhibit, I also grade myself with a 6. This is because I feel I properly utilized advanced word choices and added my own creativity to aid in the audiences appeal to my work. I believe I have grown stronger as a reader, writer, and student in this first semester of my Honors English 10 course.