Laurencia Caballero

Portfolio Reflection
University of Texas at El Paso

Through my experience in English 1311 I have gained a significant amount of

new knowledge. As I looked through my work from this semester I began
to take notice of the goals that I have achieved, partiality achieved and
some goals that I have not met as well. With our four prior major
assignments including the Writing Autoethnography, Discourse Community
Ethnography, Rhetorical Analysis, and the Entering the Discourse
assignments, I began to meet and improve on the goals that have been
set in the class, as well as my own personal goals.
The goals I have fully met are in my English 1311 course are
participating in class, peer review and understating tone structure. I have
met the goal of participating in class by discussing the readings, and
participating in class activities as well. Our first reading we discussed in
class was Manglesdorf, the objective of each reading was to understand
what the author what interested in knowing more about, what he/she is
trying to show the intended audience, and what ideas and objections stuck
out to us, and finally wether or not we agreed with the author. Throughout
almost all go my reading journals I clearly state and answer the questions
just as in did in this quote from my Manglesdorf journal, "The author in this
article is interested in knowing more about the different ideas and feelings
people have behind being bilingual, standard, and non-standard
languages and how it affects them in their personal life and academic life."
I believe I made all my journals very clear and understood each article as
well. I also believe I was helpful to my peers and followed the guidelines
for the commentary during peer review. During our first peer review
session we are not supposed to point out grammatical errors but focus
more on the content of the essay, for the autoethnography I was paired
with Juan Carlos, and I felt that I made comments that could have been
useful to help improve his essay. Such as "You should explain more or and
more about when you lived in New York, how your writing style was then
and how it changed, and also how writing helped you get rid of the stress
from the city?", here I only focused on adding more detail and deeper
content to his essay as opposed to grammar and wording.
There were many goals that I partially met throughout the semester.
Such as demonstrating the understanding of rhetoric, ability to give
and support evidence, I feel that I only partially met demonstrating
the understanding if rhetoric, because I had a more difficult time
putting it in to writing. Discussing rhetoric and understanding the
concepts was easier to understand and even use during our
presentations in class as opposed to writing it. I was able to find
good examples, quotes, and information for my Rhetorical Analysis
paper such as "ask not what your country can do for youask what
you can do for your country," and citizens of the world "ask not what
America will do for you, but what together we can do for the
freedom of man." and He also uses contrasts, 3 part lists, and
combinations of the two, which are the contrasts of two opposites, 3
part lists are simply a list of 2 items, and and he also combines the
two for greater affect. But I still had a difficult time implementing and
analyzing the information in my paper. What I also noticed in my
Rhetorical Analysis paper was that I had a difficult time using the
feedback my peers gave me to revise and focused more on the
revisions I received from my professor or the writing center. And in
the area of research and sources I could improve as well. For my
research I would usually only use a data base and read online
articles, as opposed to more fieldwork, observations, books, or
chapters from books. Finally I need to improve on my citing of
sources, which has gotten better throughout my papers, I began
with sometimes only putting the website URL, like I did in my
rhetorical essay, "http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres56.html" ,
instead of citing. Specifically I had a harder time citing information
from websites like TIME magazine, or other information from the
Libertarian Party website as well. My final paper which was the
Entering the Discourse still had some formatting and citing issues
but was much better than other papers.
Finally there were goals that I have not met this semester,
such as being able to deal with different points of view, and
improving my writing, research process and as well as my
organization. These aspects I believe are what have hurt my writing
the most. My lack of organization and procrastination in writing has
been the most difficult to overcome. Also representing all side of the
argument has been difficult for me as well, even when I attempted
to research all sides of the argument. In my entering the discourse
essay I felt that my argument for a libertarian party was much
stronger and reliable than any of my other points of view that I had
to represent in the essay.
Despite not having met every goal in the course I do believe I have made significant
progress throughout. Especially within the goals I have partially met which was
the largest group, they are new skills that I am beginning to master for future use
and reference throughout the rest of my academic career. Even though I have a
"B" average in the class, I feel that I have earned an "A." Through my
participation in class and class discussion I believe that it shows that I do
understand the topics we are learning and studying, but it is clear I have yet to
master putting it an essay format. I know that I have made quite a bit of progress
in my 1311 course, but there will be always room for improvement in every single
aspect of my writing.