Image of a baritone reflecting the colors of the sunset behind it.

 

Dear ePortfolio Reader,

 

This ePortfolio contains many of my works from this past semester, and while I hope it shares some of my personality and opinions, I’d still like to properly introduce myself. My name is Amy, and I am an English major at SUNY New Paltz. As a musician and lover of music, I had initially planned on being a music major, Music Therapy to be specific. However, after discovering my hearing loss, I decided not to go on that path, no matter how much I loved music, because I didn’t want to risk losing all of my hearing after gaining a music degree. Since I had always loved reading and writing, I decided to become an English major, but I’ll always look back fondly on my marching band days, where music consumed my everyday life.

 

Prior to this class, I never wrote first or second drafts. I always found it easiest to write an essay all at once without an outline and would edit a few things but mostly leave it as it was first written. However, after being made to write an outline and multiple drafts, I began to see the usefulness in having separate copies of drafts. Outlining quickly became the way I always start writing a paper as it’s incredibly helpful for organizing thoughts. While I only first started using the outline after the Research Paper, I continued to use it for many other assignments, including the Virtual Presentation’s Script.

 

Even outside of this class, I began to outline my work before writing a draft, and it helped significantly! In both my Philosophy class and Ancient History class, I used outlines as well as first drafts, and my grade improved drastically. While I hadn’t been failing previously, there was a marked difference in the quality between my first few essays and my last essays for those classes. 

 

ENG170 also helped me with citations and certain formats for citations, both in and outside of this class. There were a few things about MLA formatting that I had never noticed before, specifically about all the little details in the formatting. I had always trusted the citation generators to write everything correctly, but now I can recognize where periods should go and when certain phrases should be italicized or capitalized. In my other classes, I also had to be more careful with the formatting of my citations, so I’m extremely grateful as this class saved my grade from deductions due to small, easily fixed mistakes.

 

One thing I’m looking forward to working on in the future is creative writing as I’ve always been interested in it but never felt confident enough to try it. With the skills learned in this class, I feel more confident about my own writing abilities, and now I can’t wait to start writing!

 

Thank you so much for reading through my ePortfolio!

 

Sincerely, 

 

Amy Bates