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Alexander Chipley Section 51 Professor Ingram April 23, 2013 Portfolio Essay Growth is an essential part of the human existence. We anticipate it with excitement as children. We try to understand its impacts as adolescents. We try to delay the eventual decay that follows it as adults. Growth is all around us on a daily basis, and it is the key concept of college. You attend college to gain more education and maturity. That is why growth was a key concept in my English course this semester. Every student was expected to grow as a writer, and to show their growth throughout the course. That is what I am attempting to demonstrate in this essay. I use the word attempting due to the fact that Im not a perfect writer, and I can merely attempt to explain all of my thoughts. Now, Im not trying to compose this paper as a glorified list, but I will stick organizing my paper in chronological order. That being said, Im going to start at the beginning of the course. When the course started, we were given a thematic question that was to be considered throughout the duration of the course. That question was, What does it Mean to be Healthy? In the beginning portions of the class, a lot of our daily reading and writings were about personal health. We had class discussions on the importance of health and what it truly means to be healthy. The importance of these discussions was finding your inner voice, as I like to call it. I think of your inner voice as your opinion, but its strong enough to carry over from your thoughts to your writing. So in these discussions, you learned to develop this inner voice that carried

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over into your writing. That may or may not have been the purpose of our class discussions, but that is what I feel was the benefit of them. As we moved on in the course, we focused less on our thematic question of health, and more on our writing ability and styles. Our first essay involved writing about ourselves, aptly named the What is it Like to be You? essay. Quite frankly, I feel as though this was the poorest essay I have written since I have come to UNC Charlotte. I have written an essay describing my life every year in my English course since middle school. Every time I write an essay about myself, I just regurgitate the same stories I have always written, but with an update on the previous year. Unfortunately, I fell victim to that habit when writing my WILTBY essay. I did not really use any critical thinking in my paper, and I did not make many revisions to the paper during the revision process. This lack of focus is probably my biggest weakness. I just struggle putting together papers with topics I do not find particularly interesting. The WILTBY topic was definitely something I was not interested in, and my writing clearly suffered for it. I feel as though my writing improved as the semester moved forward and the topics garnered my interest. I would say the research paper that allowed me to choose my own topic is where my writing skills truly flourished, but more on that later. Moving past the WILTBY essay, we took a short journey through David Seidels book, Peace, Butter & Jelly. I found this book to be incredibly boring, despite the fact that I also found it to be well written. I never connected with any of Davids stories, and it left me disinterested in the course. The day that David came to visit, I felt completely awkward. I did not connect with anything David was saying, and I had no clue how it pertained to the course. He discussed spiritual and emotional health, and we even participated in meditation. Looking back on it, his

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visit related to the course thematic question of heath, I just struggled to connect with his philosophies, which made me lose focus once again. Once we finished up with Peace, Butter & Jelly we moved on to the writing process. The writing process is a little bit shorter for me than the typical writing practice. I do most of my brainstorming in my head, and then just write the first draft in one sitting. Of course, this is nothing like the technically correct process of having a thorough brainstorming session followed by a detailed outline of how my paper is going to be written. In all honesty, I just write my paper and go with the flow that I have in my head. During this course, I have become more accustomed to using the correct writing process. I have actually written down a few of my thoughts during the brainstorming process. The clearest example of this would definitely be my annotated bibliography. The bibliography helped me organize my research in a more concise manner, and broaden my method of research. I learned how to use the vast amount of resources I have at my disposal here at UNC Charlotte. I think that the annotated bibliography is probably my second best piece of writing in this course, but the best is yet to come. The next piece of writing I wrote for this course was the ever-present midterm essay. A common staple of the English course curriculum, the midterm essay usually deals with a summarization of what you have learned in the course so far. This midterm was not the exception to the rule. In fact, this portfolio slightly mirrors the midterm essay in some aspects. Of course, I had much less experience to work with for my midterm essay as compared to this portfolio essay. In fact, I feel as though I grew exponentially more as a writer during the second half of this course than the first half. I wrote my midterm essay with a sarcastic tone, not following the formal template I should have followed. In hindsight, Im sure I could have written a fine midterm essay with a formal tone. Honestly though, I really enjoyed writing that midterm

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essay. I loved writing with a sarcastic tone, and I especially loved the quips I inserted into that essay. I especially liked the one about the Jewish student in a Catholic school. Clearly my growth was stunted by this paper, but that doesnt stop me from smiling every time I think of it. In the end, I took a risk and it did not pay off. But what is good writing without risks? The world may never know. It probably would still be good writing, but I like a little bit of risk taking. Thats just part of my writing style. Its time to move on to what I feel is my best piece of writing for this course; my research paper. As soon as we were informed that we could choose our own topic, I knew I was going to enjoy this paper. I wanted to pick a topic I was familiar with, but had never written a paper on. Thats how I settled on my topic of the NBA high school eligibility rule. A trend I was noticing in this course was that I was not enjoying the process of writing my papers, but things were different with my research paper. I enjoyed doing my research on the paper much more than I did for my WILTBY essay and my midterm essay. While I was doing my annotated bibliography, I felt like reading the articles for my research was actually enjoyable. I even managed to find a good book in the process, Bill Simmons Book of Basketball. Writing the paper became less of a task and more of an enjoyable hobby. This feeling of enjoying writing is why my research paper was my most important paper of the course. It was the singular piece of writing that I enjoyed writing from start to finish. There was not a single moment during the process of writing this paper that I felt as though it was a chore. Not only did I enjoy writing it, I am confident that it was well written. The paper flowed nicely, I made a convincing argument, my sources were correct, and it did not have any real holes in it. It was not the greatest paper ever written, it was merely a tribute.

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Of course, my portfolio is supposed to reflect my growth throughout the course and include my best pieces of writing. In order to show growth, I deemed it necessary to also include my worst piece of writing, to establish a base. I can wholeheartedly say that my worst piece of writing is my WILTBY essay. I know for a fact that it was shoddily put together essay and suffice to say, it could have been improved by more effort and focus. My best work, as previously mentioned, is my research paper. I put more effort into than any of my other writings, and the result reflects that notion. My midterm essay was a clear display of my sarcastic tone, and might have sounded a bit patronizing. I still enjoyed writing more than everything I had previously written up to that point, and put in the proper context, I feel as though it was well written. Of course, that context was probably not one that involved a formal essay, but I digress. Up until this point, I have only mentioned the essays I have written in this course and seemingly ignored the smaller writings we have done. I attribute this to the fact that I barely remember them due to the insignificance I labeled them with in my head. I dont mean to say that in a condescending manner. In fact, I recognize this as a mistake after going back and looking through my blog posts and daily writings. They were intended to aid me with whatever subject we were dealing with at the time, whether it was writing an essay or focusing on a major concept in the course. I now realize that I should have regarded them with more importance, and perhaps should have used them as a guide to writing my essays. Hindsight is 20/20, and I have nobody to blame but myself for that lack of focus. In fact, focus is probably the one area I have matured in the most throughout this course. We have done a lot of writing over the length of this course, and my focus has increased as we have moved along. I can honestly say my focus is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was at the beginning of this course.

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Looking back on this course, I would say I did a pretty sound job of improving my writing skills. My organization improved parallel to my focus improving. I never found my grammar to be a problem, and I would consider any improvement in that department to be modest at best. My critical thinking has always been one of my strengths, and I could not find a correlation between improved critical thinking and this course. Thats not to say this course does not involve critical thinking skills, I just feel that my critical thinking skills were just fine coming into this course. Taking personal responsibility for my learning was a concept I welcomed with open arms. I would not like teaching myself everything, but working independently on a project is my preferred style of work. I can work with a team, but I would much rather complete a task on my own terms. Risk taking wasnt a very noticeable aspect of this course, at least in my mind. Others might have taken risks with their research paper topics, but I felt that my topic was lowrisk. The riskiest piece of writing that I did was the midterm essay, and that wasnt by design. I definitely created that risk all by myself. Maturity was another concept in this course, but I feel the only maturing I did was in my increased focus. There were other concepts in this course, but none of them truly affected me, in my opinion. The course has been a journey of change for me over the semester. It was like my own little writing puberty. I gained maturity in my attention to detail, and I put together a solid body of work. There were times of struggle, followed by times of success. That success defines my participation in this course. Regardless of what I grade I receive, I feel as though this class has been a success. Of course, Im not above good ol fashioned sucking up. I would really enjoy an A for the course, just putting that out there. Moving on from that tangent, I would just like to mention that I honestly enjoyed this course. I would go as far to say that my writing reflects that,

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except for the sarcastic tone that occasionally creeps into my writing. All in all, I like the way my portfolio is organized. How do I know this? Because of the smile I had after it was finished.