ENGL 131 e-Portfolio (Spring 2006)

While writing for English 131, I have come to realize a lot about my writing style. I began this course with a somewhat arrogant view of my ability; I had been through a tough highschool curriculum without too much trouble and had even earned very high grades on papers in a college history class without taking a course meant to teach college writing. I still believe my prior writing was strong, but I have an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of my essays that no class other had properly instilled in me after working towards the Outcomes of the English 131 curriculum.

I had written analytical papers, both literary and historical, but rarely with a deep focus on developing the argument into an interesting one as opposed to an easily supported one. I always incorporated evidence from outside texts, but often I tried to use the quote as part of my own writing, not bothering to contextualize it, since it appeared to fit properly. My strategies for organizing and defendng my argument were always simplistic; multiple sources would never be compared to each other and each claim within a paper was disjoint from the rest, much of the analysis and structuring I felt I had done was left to the reader to do again, with very mixed results. The essays that resulted were workable pieces of writing, a strong start towards a good essay, however the worst part of my old writing style was the minimal editing and revision I did. I was content with the ideas covered and I typically made few mistakes in spelling or grammar, both of which led to carelessness and a definite need for good revision and editing.

The essays chosen for this portfolio reflect improvements in all four of the Outcomes. "Interpreting Ramamurthy" emphasizes a deeper use of a source text than in previous courses. "The Chicano Contact Zone" exemplifies my skill applying ideas to evidence and evidence to ideas to demonstrate my opinion about the aptness of those ideas. "The Influence of Back and Quaade on Ramamurthy's "Constructions of Illusion" contains thorough comparisons of two texts' underlying ideas, combining the emphasis on intertextuality and deep analysis of a source from the previous two. "Defining the 'Contact Zone'" reflects an ability to analyze within the confines of another author's terminology and eventually reapply those terms to a wider focus. Finally, "A New Imagined Community: The Gamer" is the sum of the foci of the other four essays; it combines the intertextuality and close reading of the first three with the ability to define, apply, and reinterpret another author's ideas from the fourth to create what I believe is my strongest paper from the English 131 course.