Dear Mrs.

Hofman, I feel as though this semester has flew by, and I am just now getting used to things down here. This class has helped me transition into the University of North Carolina at Charlotte by allowing me to get to know my classmates on a deeper level. Through our peer editing groups, and the open class room discussions I have grown as a student, and learned a lot about my classmates. The assignments that we have done this year have been unlike any other assignments that I have done in high school which is very nice. I have never actually taken the chance to reflect on how my background has affected my writing and language. I also have never written a paper on a community I was not already very knowledgeable about, which I had to do this semester. Both things though have opened up my mind to new possible ideas, and have pushed me to mature as a writer. I have worked very hard, and extended myself with my writings this semester. Generally with all of the papers I have written this semester I had to think outside of my normal comfort zone. With our Language and Literacy assignment, I had to reflect on my life and look at the way that different aspects have shaped me into the person that I am today. Coming from Buffalo, New York plays a major factor in who I am. Also the fact that I attended an all-girls private high school in Buffalo called Nardin Academy is a significant piece of my past. This paper was different because I had to look back on the things that distinguish me from other people, which makes me, me. One of the other paper we had to write was about a discourse community. I had struggled a lot with this paper, specifically with deciding what to do. I was not a part of many clubs on campus yet, and the ones that I am a part of, we were not allowed to use. I ended up stumbling upon the idea of UNCC Confessions, and after I got the idea in my head, everything started to come together. I did tons of research on the community and even go to talk to the

admin which was very helpful. Both of these papers were very different for me, but that simply made them interesting to work on. My Language and Literacy paper was one that I spent a lot of time thinking about. I had to plan out what I was going to write about and what aspects of my life played a vital role in who I am today. I thought about my friends, I thought about cheerleading, I thought about the jobs that I had, and I thought about many different options. I landed on three: my family, my high school, and my city. I come from a very large and loud Irish-American family. We speak in our own kind of language with random vowels and random phrases just spurted out at random times. We can be mean, yet we love each other uncontrollably. My family is unlike any other and they have definitely played a big part in who I am today. My Grandmother on the McDonald side of my family is an absolute peach. She is 93 years old, and just this past year has she started to lose some of her memory. She is the reason that I attended my high school Nardin Academy. Nardin Academy is the number one high school in western New York. It is an all-girls private high school, and I was a legacy there. My Grandmother graduated from Nardin Academy in 1938 after attending Nardin from 1st grade through 12th. She then went on the teach at Nardin Academy. My Aunt Aileen, the only girl on the McDonald side of the family also attended Nardin Academy. If I did not go to Nardin, I would have been the skipped generation of McDonalds at the school, so it was quite a big deal that I went there. My school had all kinds of girls, everything from the absurdly rich, to the dirt poor and there on a scholarship. For the most part though, my school contained girls in the upper middle class. My school was very adamant that we stay the number one school in Western New York, so our curriculum was very rigorous. This had pushed me in my language and my writing skills, which in the end improved my skills tremendously. Lastly I talk about coming from Buffalo, New York. People from up North are

already classified with distinct characteristics, but Buffalo in particular is a city of its own. Coming from Buffalo, people down South think that I say things differently (which I do not). I say things such as sneakers, suckers, and eat things such as sponge candy, chicken finger subs, and wings. All of these things are different in the South. I say things differently, and I have a different dialect than most, all things that have molded me into the person that I am. When writing this paper, I felt like I did a good job in expressing the true differences in my qualities versus the norm. When I talk about going to a private school versus a public school, I try and get the reader to feel like they are making the transition with me. When I talk about being from Buffalo, and the different areas, and atmospheres I want the readers to feel like they are walking the streets of the heart of Buffalo, and get a sense of the community that we have there. I feel like I did good work on this paper especially because I do have things that make me unique. The paper that we wrote on a discourse community was an extremely difficult task for me at first. I literally could not leave square one because I could not figure out what it was that I wanted to write about. It was not until late in the process of deciding and drafting that the idea of UNCC Confessions came to me. After this idea popped into my head I could not stop thinking of ideas. UNCC Confessions is an online community that is run through social media websites. It is not associate with the school, nor any other established organization. It was created by a student, and is generally used for the students to vent and tell their secrets anonymously. I feel as though this is my best entry because it is so different from anything that I have written. I had to actually interview someone (other than friends or family) and take what they said and put it into my work. When I first got this idea I knew that I would not get far if I could not get an inside scoop. I emailed the UNCC Confessions page asking them some questions, in hopes that I would get a response. I got one better than just a response, the admin offered to meet with me. I was under

the impression that the admins of this page were a secret, but I found out that it is not necessarily that they are a secret, they are just not public with who they are. Preparing for the interview I came up with a list of about 15-20 questions I felt would be beneficial to my paper. The meeting ran smoothly and I got almost all of my questions answered and then some. I feel as though if I did not have this interview with the admin, I would not be as proud of this piece, because it would not give the readers an insight into the actual page. My peer editing group consisted of Callie, Suzana, Adrianna, and Kirsten. I have grown pretty close with all of these girls because of this class. They have helped me grow as a writer and also transition into school here and UNC Charlotte. Our peer editing groups were very beneficial and the girls gave me direct feedback. I have a tendancy to be very wordy with my work, but my peer editing group picked up on that and tries to focus on that while reading my work. I also will sometimes ramble on about things that are irrelevant to the paper, which just causes confusion. My group has picked up on that and helped me focus in on my work. I really enjoyed working with these girls throughout the semester and feel like they helped me grow as a writer. Creating a e-portfolio was something that I had never done before. I have kept a portfolio of all my work throughout high school, but I did not ever organize it onto a website. In fact, this was really the first time that I went just about 100% paperless for a class. Using the e-portfolio I never had a reason to print out my papers because they were all submitted online. I felt like this was a very nice change from my high school English classes. I did not really know much going into the whole e-portfolio concept. We were given a couple websites that we could use, we played around with them a bit, and then we picked and began. I chose Wix for my e-portfolio which I am unsure if I would choose again. I choose Wix because I found a design that I really

liked. I thought that it was clean and easy to use, and I felt like there was really no room for clutter. I did not play around much with Weebly, the other website that we were suggested to use, which I somewhat regret. After going through the entire creation of the page, I found from my peers that Weebly was very easy to use, while Wix on the other had was a little more complex. After I figured out how to work all of the features on Wix though, it was not a problem. Figuring all of that out was difficult though. I chose to display my major works using Scribd. because I liked the way that the readers could scroll through the pages without leaving your website. For the drafts, in class writings, and moodle submissions I choose to use buttons which will open up my works. I did this because I felt like these pieces were not as predominant in showcasing my work. I felt like they were more for if the readers wanted to get a further insight into my writings. I feel like this class has helped me a ton as a writer. With the feedback from my peers, and from you as the professor I feel like I have worked on some of the issues I have when writing papers. I hope to continue this portfolio because even if people do not read it, it is a good way to organize my work while still being able to put some background into it. I hope that I can further grow with my writing in my next English class, and I hope that I find the commentary to be as beneficial. Thank you for all of your help throughout the semester!

Sincerely, Michaela McDonald