This online portfolio has been created to show how I have grown as a writer in WR150.

Throughout this semester I have been able of working on specific areas of my writing skills. As I will show, my third essay is a much better essay than the previous ones because of this progress. Over all, I am confident in saying that I improved at every stage of the writing process. I also learned how to find reliable sources and how to properly summarize them. In particular, I feel that I improved in the way I plan and draft my essays. Also, and more importantly, learned many revising techniques that have helped increase the quality of my final work. One small thing were I feel some improvement is in they way I understand the content of what I am reading. As we can see in Artifacts 4 and 5, my summarizing skills improved from one work to the other. Artifact 4: Response to Dream Story first shows a small summary of the first chapter of Schnitzler' Dream Story. Although the chapter is just a few pages long I made some mistakes on some details of the story. For example, Fridolin is not the governor (para, 4). I believe I made this mistake because when I was reading Dream Story I was absent minded and I was thinking about something else. Since that error was pointed out to me I realized that I needed to fully concentrate on the text and attempt to avoid day dreaming. Learning this was particularly useful when working on essay 3. For essay 3, one has to go through many texts in order to find good, reliable sources (I will talk about this topic further in my essay). In contrast with Artifact 4, Artifact 5: Dora Exercise present a nice and concise summary of Freud's book Dora. The main reason why this summary was better than the first was because when I was reading Dora I would take a pause every few pages and think about what I had just read. By doing this I could realize if I had truly understood the text and I could refocus my mind on the text. Another aspect of where I feel like I have improved as a writer is in the way I draft my essays. Artifacts 6-8 present my notes and drafts for essays two and three. Although to an outside reader the notes might seem sparse and disorganized, to me they are the key that holds my essay together. As we can see in Artifact 6, I keep track of the quotes I believe I may want to use and I number them so that when I am writing a draft I can say something like First Dream: [include the dream]. Freud says the dream is about Her K. I think its about her parents marriage. use Q1. In this sentence I am making a note to use quote 1 from my list of quotes. It is also useful to keep a list of quotes because it allows me to quickly remember the main ideas in the text. Although I rarely use all my quotes, I find it is a good habit to have an efficient list of quotes. In contrast to Artifact 6, Artifact 7: Essay 3 Notes has a somewhat different format. Essay 2 included no more than two sources. While essay 3 ended up using more than ten. The format of my notes on essay 3 is specifically designed to helping me keep track which paper has which ideas. In a similar way to what I did in Artifact 6, I keep track of specific quotes that I feel might be of use for my paper. Before WR150 I had gotten into the habit of keeping some notes for planning my essay. However, throughout this semester I made a conscious effort to be more organized and to include more information in the notes I took. I found that good notes were of great help to writing a good, logical paper. Once I have a clear idea of what my topic will be and where I would like to take its contents, I try to create an outline before I start writing. However, for essay 3, because my topic was so broad, I decided that it would make more sense to start writing section by section. This was very helpful because by doing so, I could focus on a single section at a time. Since I decided to have three section, I could concentrate on finding good sources for one section at a time. I also found this division to be very useful because it made it easier for me to write sections two and three once section one had been done. Artifact 8: Essay 3 Draft 1 shows my first version of the essay. The draft includes an introduction and and most of section one. One of the goals of WR150 is to teach us, students, how to find reliable sources and how to make good use of them. For essays 1 and 2 (Artifacts 1 and 2 respectively) we do not have to worry about finding sources because the professor provides them. However, for essay 3 we are pretty much

standing on our own. Since the topic I chose for my paper (lucid dreaming) is not exactly traditional, I had some trouble finding reliable sources. My first trip to the library would have been useless if it were not for the book my professor put in the reserve room. After that trip I realized that most academic writing on lucid dreaming was going to be found online. That is when I decided to started using some of the tools the university provides (like RefWorks or the BU library database). As I sat down to commence my search, I realized that I did not even know what I was looking for. I then had a different idea. I would use a search engine to find the most influential academic researchers on my topic and then I would use a database to find their publications. More often than not, I would find myself looking at the bibliography of other articles. I soon discovered that in the topic of lucid dreaming there were a few essential authors that everyone talked about. This authors include Stephan LaBerge, Celia Green, Jane Gackenbach and Alan Hobson, amongst others. I also found that many of the online journals on lucid dreaming were a great source of information. Another good database of academic papers where the Lucidity Institute and the Lucidity Letter by SpiritWatch. In my search for material, I stumbled across many websites that offered tutorials and tips on how to lucid dream. I also found many forums on the topic. Although neither of these can serve as reliable sources, I used them to get a broader understanding of why other people choose to lucid dream. Those same websites often had links or made reference to some academic papers on a specific topic that I was interested in reading (that is how I found some translations of the German psychologist Paul Tholey's work). By this point I had an idea of what I wanted my essay to discuss. Although I did not have a full outline, writing the Formal Prospectus (Artifact 9) helped me clarify my ideas. I also found the Formal Prospectus to be very useful because it forced me to take a step back and see what sources I had, what material they covered and what areas of my paper still felt blank. As I was finished gathering the material I was going to need for my paper, I realized that there were a few books the BU library did not have that could potentially be of interest (like Celia Green's Lucid Dreaming). I ended my research by going to the Boston Public Library were I was able to find some of the books I could not find at BU. This trip was also particularly enjoyable because it had been almost a year since I had last entered BPL. I wrote my Annotated Bibliography (Artifact 10) after going to the Public Library. The annotated Bibliography presents a list of the sources I knew I was definitely going to use in my paper. I also found that making notes on some of my sources helped me realize which sources I had truly understood and which I had not. The last thing I would like to talk about is my writing style. This is the area where I feel I have most improved as a writer (compare essay 3 to essay 1). After talking to my professor about my second essay, he helped me realize that my English grammar skills were not as good as I thought they were. When I write a paper in a language that is not my native language I often find that I cannot distinguish most of my grammatical mistakes. My professor gave me a small book that had some concise grammatical exercises and that focused on teaching proper sentence structure. Although I did not go through the entire book, the chapters I did go through were very helpful and reminded me of some of the things I had learned in middle school that I never really thought of. It is because of this book that I feel like the quality of my third paper is by far superior to the first two. Overall, I would say that WR150 was successful as a class in teaching me how to find good and reliable sources. I would also like to say that because I am an Engineering student, most of my classes rarely require me to write an essay. After taking this course I am a lot more comfortable with my written English and I feel like I am less likely to make grammatical mistakes.