Vo, Khang Ms.

Ingram College Writing 1103 Thursday, 22 Nov 2012 Portfolio Essay Time sure flies, especially when you are having fun. Now I have only a few meetings left to complete this writing course. Its about time to sit down and reflect on what I have done and learned throughout this semester. I have completed multiple major writing assignments: a Whats it like to be you (WILTBU) exploratory essay, an Annotated Bibliography, a 3-Sided exploratory assignment and an argumentative research essay. Other assignments include weekly reading assignments from my textbooks, blogging daily in- and out-of-class writing activities completed in my writers notebook, and group work-shopping. Different types of writing actually helped me develop my skills overall. I had to use various writing styles and tones to approach specific situations. For major assignments such as essay and the likes, I had to polish my sentences, pay attention to structure and grammar as well as punctuation. To that end, I wrote multiple (usually 4) drafts for each assignment. Through trial and error, I honed my formal writing skills and became more familiar with academic environment. Other types of assignments such as blogging and free writing complement formal style effectively. With those kinds of assignment, I could be more flexible had more freedom to express my ideas without thinking too much about structure. It is important to free your creativity once in a while, and I found that many precious ideas suddenly came

to me when I wrote a blog post or simply my random thoughts. I then applied those newfound ideas to my essays. Overall, these different writings have worked together in order to help me achieve my goal as a writer. Writing style is not the only thing worth mentioning about those assignments. Their contents and topics are also very important. I found my thinking and knowledge enriched much by a variety of diverse topics I have approached. What its like to be you essay gave me a chance to explore myself under many points of view. I was sincerely surprised by what I found: aspects of myself that I had never seen before. This is probably the assignment I invested my feeling the most, but it is the 3 sided essay that I like the most, among other things. Too many times we as simple people think about issues with only two values in mind: right or wrong, good or bad, true or false. Unfortunately, true life is not that simple. The time of fairy tales where only good people and bad guys exist has long gone and we now face life with all of its complexity and ambiguity. It is impossible to just listen to one side of the argument and comprehend the whole story. Because different men see the same thing under different light, we need to consider the issue with different, even opposing, points of view. Only through doing that can we have a chance to perceive the truth as accurately as possible. The 3 sided essay explores this aspect in critical writing. Therefore, I think this is the most important assignment I have done in this course. One of the most important concepts I have studied in this class is critical inquiry. To me, life is full of questions, varying from trivial thing What should I eat today? to more serious ones Does life worth living? Where can one find happiness? I have always many unanswered questions in my mind since I was a child, and I considered one

of my goals in life is to answer all of them. Im still looking for my answers, waiting for me on the longest journey call life. Sometimes I suddenly realized that the reason why I couldnt find an answer was because I did not know how to ask. How could I hope to find the right answers if I did not have the right questions? It is not Is life worth living? but How to make life worth living? It is not Where can one find happiness? but rather, How to create your own happiness? The difference is very subtle, yet very meaningful. If you can ask the right question, you come much further on the way to the truth. What does it take to make meaningful questions? Thats when critical inquiry comes into place. I have learned to make critical inquiries, or making meaningful and appropriate questions that investigate the issue given sufficiently. I think the skill to make critical inquiries is very necessary in normal life, not just academic life. Once in a while, we run into problems that require the use of inquiry and analytical skills, and Im glad I could hone these skills in this class through almost every writing assignment I have completed. Another benefit of writing so much is I was be able to recognize my shortcoming and weaknesses. My vocabulary is somewhat limited. I had trouble finding loaded words to enrich my essay and avoiding the repeat of favorite but commonly-used words. I used to spend a whole hour surfing on the internet to find just one appropriate word. The second thing that I dont like about my writing style is its awkwardness, One of my peer told me I had a few running sentences and I had to agree with him. Sometimes I feel that my paragraphs are too burdensome and not concise as I thought them should be. After all, there is a reason we created so many drafts. Every time I revised my draft, I was able to reconstruct my paragraph, rewrite my sentences, add convincing evidences,

remove irrelevant ideas, correct any mistaken in grammar and punctuality, making my essay less redundant and awkward, more concise and effective. My third concern is about connection between paragraphs in the same essay. Too many times I had a feeling that my paragraphs are so disconnected that they looked more like stand alone ideas rather than components of the larger essay.