Dear portfolio readers,

Thank you for taking time out of your day to read this letter. To start, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Antolin German, and I’m a freshman. Before this course, I believed my writing was very artificial and robotic. Throughout this course, I’ve noticed I’ve been making progress and even breaking out of my robotic habits. I’ve also noticed that my writing has developed a personality which is significant to me because I always felt like I could take my writing to another level and now I’m doing just that. Another critical component to that was editing and revising. When it comes down to brainstorming, I’m always able to put my ideas on paper and formulate it into an essay or letter. I struggled with editing, and I was trying to figure out what more I could do to improve my writing.
During this course, I learned how to edit effectively. When revising, I would put myself in the shoes of my audience, I would read it as if I had never read this essay before. I would ask myslef how could I make this introduction better? How could I grab the readers’ attention? How could I show and not tell? Once I started asking myself these questions and stepping outside my perspective, I improved at editing my essays. Furthermore, I’ve improved at diction, and I’ve been able to articulate my sentences to give off the tone I want. This skill has even been useful in my other classes such as in my Music of Western Traditions class.
One of my favorite topics was academic writing/essay theme. This topic actually ties back with what I was saying in the beggining. During class we went over the classic 5 paragraph theme. Which was basically a robotic theme. Students would stick to this theme because it was so easy to answer the prompt. The problem with this was that students lacked creativity and personality in their writing. Which was what I was struggling with. Going over this topic made me realize that my writing revolved around this 5-paragraph theme. In realizing and acknowledging that my writing was robotic I was able to break out of the cycle.
In the second half of the semester, we will be working on argumentative and research-based writing. Currently, my focus is research, citations, and sentence structure. I’m able to formulate strong body paragraphs, so I want to focus on the small things because the small things will always make it look and sound better.