Kevin Phan

Mr. Slater

Adv. Composition, Period 2

8 December 2015

Reflective Letter

Reflective Letter

Dear Mr. Slater,

            In my portfolio, you will find my revised pieces of writing. I chose to revise three pieces from my Writer’s Notebook and these pieces were “Writing with Limitations”, “Writing with Voice”, and the “Smell Stimuli Narrative.” I chose these three pieces because I felt that they represent my various writing styles. I took a more serious approach in the “Smell Stimuli Narrative” while the other two journal entries were more lighthearted and fun. Then, I decided to revise my “Literacy Narrative” because I knew that this piece could be improved because we learned many new techniques and methods that could applied to this piece. I hope you enjoy seeing my portfolio and my improvement over this semester.

The Act of Writing

            At first, I thought writing for classes and writing in general was a little tedious. It was just so much writing over topics that I didn’t really care about and I was tired of it. Before, I came in thinking it was going to be just another English class where we would be tested on things like what meaning certain ideas held or how to develop meaningful ideas in just one class period. Instead, we took our time and made sure our ideas were solid before finishing up our essays. And we had so many opportunities to write over topics that we wanted to do instead of just preset subjects that everyone had to write about. I like writing because I could use it as a means to vent or even to make other people feel better. I could make people laugh and entertain them through my writing but because previous classes, I didn’t really have any opportunities to express that. I am beginning to like writing again because we had so much freedom in this class. Writing is and always will be important in our daily lives. It surrounds everything in the past and everything in the now so we have to pay attention to its impact and become better writers ourselves. Writing hold much more significance than it did before in my life and is becoming more and more enjoyable. I am making pieces that I am actually proud and happy about instead of before where I was stressed out because of a rushed, sloppy essay. I knew writing was important before coming into this class and my perception of it is very similar to my view of it now. However, I truly enjoy it now instead of previous years. My writing process has greatly improved from before because although I had rough drafts, they were never really as completed as the rough drafts I have now. They were either only a paragraph or just bullet points of ideas and really didn’t have much substance to them. Now, I feel like my rough drafts are more developed and that’s really helpful because I don’t have to stress out about finishing the final copies at a reasonable time. I also don’t have to worry about finishing it in time to have my friends read it because they can just read it along the way and I can progress from there. You really have to put effort throughout the entire writing process if you want to succeed.

Personal Struggles

            I feel like I still struggle with voice. I think I’m getting better at writing in particular voices but I really need to relax and just write. I overthink certain aspects of my writing and that really stops my progress. My voice is one of the most significant parts of my writing and I want to make sure that my voice is heard. I believe this because I read through my previous essays and they’re all similar in voice. Of course there is informal language used here and there and more formal writing is apparent in this essay but it is very similar. I want to work on that and improve upon it so my writing becomes more engaging. I always had very lengthy sentences and strange sentence structures and that became clearer to me through my peer revisions and conferences with you. I think I’m getting better at making my ideas more concise and better put together. The hardest essay for me was the Literacy Narrative. I liked writing this one because I really liked my ideas but I had no idea how to start it. It was very open-ended with formatting because we were telling a story. There was no specific way to do it because it’s different for everyone. I kept telling myself it had to be this way or that way but all I did was just try and write it and see how it worked. I had to write my narrative through my actual voice because it was about me. I thought too hard about it and wasted a lot of unnecessary energy over it. It was the first multi-draft essay we did so I didn’t really know how to start it and I had no background as to what you wanted for this specific class. I definitely feel more confident when describing anything and I feel like this helped me progress towards making my own unique voice.

Personal Growth

            I am very happy with the improvement over my grammar and conventions skills. I wasn’t very confident with my grammar and conventions but after the practice with No Red Ink and the journal activities, I really saw progress. I also consistently received 3s and 4s in the grammar sections which made me very happy. I feel like my strongest piece was the Argumentative paper we wrote about. Although I was honest through all of my other papers, I really wanted to be blunt and convince my audience of my passion. I liked this piece because it had my attitude and personality in it while keeping a professionalism that convinced my audience. My argument was aimed towards younger audiences who had the influence to change the media around them. It was to all youth because the minority has to speak up if they want their wishes to be fulfilled and the majority has to be informed in order to help create equality in the entertainment industry. In this essay, I tried to rework the points so they would flow together better and so they would be connected to each other. Each paragraph was made in order to support the main argument but they also should have to support the other paragraphs to make a solid case. Of course, I believe there are still problems that need to be fixed in it. I feel like I should have hit more appeals in my essay. I know my facts were solid and my credentials and the credentials of my sources were professional. I did touch on the appeal to pathos however I feel like I didn’t do that enough. I talked about injustices, inequality, bullying, and depression but I wish I had put in a personal anecdote from somebody to strengthen my argument.