Reflective Cover Letter

 

Dear ePortfolio Readers,

Taking ENG160 was definitely a great experience for me. It’s the first accelerated and fully online class I have taken in college and while I did find it a bit difficult at times, I found it to be a great class to take to further develop my research and writing skills.

Before taking this course, I thought my writing skills were pretty good, at least at a high-school level. I wrote plenty of essays and 1 research paper in high school and performed well on them, but I never wrote one in a college setting, so I was unsure how I would do in more advanced classes that had a much larger emphasis on writing and research. After taking this course, I learned how to write an annotated bibliography, learned how to use the library for conducting research, outline much more effectively and be able to create scripts and be able to create presentations.

Out of the main course assignments, I feel the most successful elements of them were the research process, learning how to create proper citations, and language use. Learning how to cite properly was very important as this is a fundamental of creating college papers, otherwise it would be just plagiarism. Learning about the research process was also very important, as in the past, I did not know how to use the library to conduct research. And concluding with language use, I learned how to fix my problems with my wording being too vague by replacing them with more specific language. If I had to revise any of my assignments, I would like to organize my essay a little better to make it a stronger paper as well as put more examples of my researched issues occurring in my area.

I consider my work on my ePortfolio as something I created for everyone to see just as a way to get to know me as a student better. Describing this process, I would say it was time consuming, but still very rewarding for me as others can see my work and learn more about me, as this ePortfolio allowed me to show my work to fellow ENG160 students as well as give them the full story about my journey on why I decided to major in computer science.

As my journey in ENG160 comes to an end, I’ve learned many valuable tools in this lesson (and in quite a short amount of time!) to prepare to move forward to ENG170. Originally, I was very skeptical of my ability to write high quality papers in college, primarily due to my lack of experience of writing research papers and essays at that level. Now that I know how to research better, cite properly and create an annotated bibliography, I feel much more confident in my abilities at writing at a university level, and my attitude has shifted from dreading writing as something I have to try not to fail. Now, I view it as something I can succeed in with enough effort, and with an attitude like that, I feel fully prepared for college-level and professional writing situations. I have also begun to use strategies I learned from this course in other classes as well. In my comparative politics class, I need to do research on a certain country and write about it as part of the assignment, but the assignment will be much easier for me now, as I can now use the library database to find sources to use in my research. I will keep doing this in the future with my future English classes and classes that have a heavy emphasis on writing.

Thank you for spending your time reading this reflective letter and exploring my ePortfolio.

Sincerely,

Ali Swalha