Dear ePortfolio Reader,

Welcome to my ePortoflio!

Before this course, I was super concerned about my overall English performance, specifically my grammars, expressing of ideas, and levels of formality. Writing is not difficult when it comes to thinking about the different details to write about for the assignments. However, what is challenging to me is expressing my thinking in formal and fluent English sentences for the readers to understand. Often times when I write essays or letters, the idea that I am trying to express is usually misconstrued and the deficiency with my grammar makes it even harder to interpret by the readers. Eventually writing has become one of my biggest academic weaknesses but I am always willing to write to seek for improvement. In ENG 160, I was engaged with numerous writings about topics that I can easily brainstorm and eventually formed an essay in my mind. However, writing the same idea out was not easy. When I ultimately wrote the draft of the essays, I realized that some of the ideas was not delivered well. In addition, I did several revisions to optimize my thinking to write it out. There are few assignments that I considered myself doing a decent job which is the Persuasive Essay and the Virtual Presentation. By “decent” I do not refer to the writing or the competency but my general improvement in saying and writing formal and easily interpreted English. In the Persuasive Essay, I was writing to advocate about the usage of nutrition labels in university dining halls. I begin with the general understanding of nutrition and how it might affect our health. In addition, I started to bring the attention of the reader to the university dining halls and combine it with the nutrition facts and ultimately showing the readers why implementing nutritional labels is necessary. In this assignments, there are still numerous mistakes in terms of grammars and formality but at the same time, I do realize the improvement in expressing my ideas to the readers. In terms of conveying, ENG 160 had also help with my verbal English. We were often times asked to share our perspective in a particular topic which is very helpful for me to practice in speaking formal English sentences. In addition, the Virtual Presentation was the most difficult but enjoying assignment. I am assigned to create a short video that establish my ideas in previous assignments. The assignment requires not only continuously reading but also speaking clearly and formally. I did learn a lot from these assignments and it is definitely applicable to future courses.

Thank you for taking the time to read my ePortfolio!

Sincerely,

 

Andy Yang