Reflections on Portfolio and Class
After reviewing my portfolio and my notebook, I feel my strongest piece of writing is my short story. In the short story, there weren’t many rules and guidelines that I had to follow. I was able to really enjoy writing because I could choose the topic and make it some thing that I was interested in. I think my weakest piece of writing was the short story critical lens that we had to write in school. I feel that my writing is much stronger if I have time to write it, and then come back and edit it. With the critical lens, we only had an hour to come up with ideas, write the essay and then review it before we had to hand it in. After I took it home and worked on it over the next couple of days, the quality of the writing became much better.
I think the pace of the course
could be improved. I don’t think that
the whole semester went too slow or too fast, but the speed fluctuated unevenly
through out the course. When we were
reading Lord of the Flies, we had many days to read one chapter. When reading Catcher in the Rye, we
were expected to read many chapters in one night. We spent many weeks learning all the
different aspects of “Lord of the Flies,” but much less time learning about
“Catcher in the
I enjoyed the short story unit the most. The short stories involved less reading and were overall easier than reading the two books. In the short story unit, I was able to explore many different genres that you can’t encounter with one book. Also, in the short story unit, we were given the chance to do some creative writing which I really enjoyed. I think I enjoyed the Catcher in the Rye unit the least. When reading the book, I felt rushed, due to the fact that we had to read many chapters in one night. Though I did read most of the book over the vacation, we seemed to speed through the lessons and were not able to go into great depth like we did with Lord of the Flies.
This course is entitled composition. At the beginning of the year, I expected only to do writing and the second semester would only be reading. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the two were actually integrated and the title meant less than I thought. To me, there are two different types of writing. There is creative writing, and there is the type of writing where you have to explain your thoughts and knowledge, like that used in essays and critical lenses. I do not enjoy critical lenses. I think the amount of time we spent on essay writing was sufficient enough to learn what was necessary, although I truly did not enjoy it.
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