Ethan Tison 11/18/14

FPE Final Draft

UWRT 1101
Ingram T/R 2-3:15

Final Portfolio Essay

Hello and welcome to the E-Portfolio of Ethan Tison, for the class of UWRT 1101! This
website is organized by splitting up the requirements of the portfolio into separate pages for
every aspect or group of assignments, yet all of the concepts and learning in the course are
interconnected, like the many interweaving strands of a spiderweb. Thus, the website has a main
idea, and then progresses across different pages multiple times. However, to avoid making this
papers organizational structure VERY confusing by continually making connections and
jumping aground like a scattered mind- map, I shall mainly discuss one topic at a time, and let
the reader derive the implicit and explicit connections. Look up at the top of this page. Do you
see that navigation bar? That is what you can use to navigate at will to any page or artifact as it is
mentioned in this FPE. Within the FPE itself, as well as various parts of the portfolio, there are
lots of links and visual organization, so you can hopefully find any part of the website from any
other page, and thereby progress or review previous elements at will.
Rather than being a dusty old museum of what happened in this course, this format is more of a
single synopsis and then a scavenger hunt to discover how different elements of this portfolio
relate to one another, all wrapped up with some peaceful colors and clean spacing to give a calm,
spacious, relaxing feel.

Upon sitting down to write this essay, I was at a loss, because I didnt feel like Id really
learned much in the class I felt more like I had just completed another series of tasks, and not
gained much from doing so. In my first impressions, I had been most challenged by the ideas that
I or Ms. Ingram had had, for going above and beyond in such things as writing an entire new
paper for my Literacy Narrative, a thing that I ended up forgetting about until it was too late. In
my first impressions, the requirements were just the bare minimum greatness and the most
learning came from exceeding them. However, upon actually beginning to analyze the artifacts in
this course, and looking at the instruction sheet, and such, I do agree that indeed, though I may
not have often been pushed out of my comfort zone in terms of assignment difficulty (except
perhaps temporally, since outside obligations sometimes made it a challenge to complete things
on time), I did end up learning some things, and gaining experience and skill with some
particular types of writing. One of these things that I learned was about feedback, and revising in
general.
I have always been a curious thinker and responsible worker, but as far as revising
someone elses paper and giving feedback, or applying this same type of feedback to my own
writing, I had somehow never in my memory experienced such an activity. It was quite
interesting to see how helpful it was for both me and the people I was helping! For example,
when I read over Nathans second draft of his Literacy Narrative (Feedback artifacts), since we
were mainly noting ideas and concepts in our editing, I was giving Nathan my thoughts on his
word choice, his story structure, and what types of details to include. Most of this was done
verbally, since we were sitting in the same room as I read, though I did write some things down
on the paper itself. The reason I remember this particular giving of feedback being so important

is just because of one (in my opinion) awesome idea I had for his paper, that he ended up trying
(with limited success) to implement. My idea was that since his paper was all about growing in
literacy due to Nathan learning how to beat the games big, powerful boss, and since hed just
recently learned after much struggling to satisfy his friends big, strong dads demands, He
should link those two similar concepts, auto create more of a cause- effect metaphor between the
game and real life. I told him that it would be cool it he would really play up the fact that it was a
struggle to satisfy the dads request, to more closely align with the difficulty of the boss, thus
creating such a similar concept, that the boss is indistinguishable from the dad, and then because
of those similarities, make it seem that the reason he was able to beat the boss in the game was
because hed already learned how to and succeeded in defeating the boss in real life, thus
increasing his literacy enough to succeed. I gave him several suggestions along those lines, we
both thought that it was a super- cool idea, and he then tried to used the idea in his next draft. I
was pleased to not only have had such a cool idea, but to have helped someone else in their
writing. I guess it just goes to show how a fresh set of eyes can help notice things never- seenbefore things.
Of course, it wasn't just giving feedback that was cool. I received four sets of peer
feedback on my first and second drafts of my Literacy narrative essay, one of each of which are
listed in my writer's notebook section. Upon receiving the very useful and interesting feedback, I
was amazed by how helpful was, and was disappointed that I have never had the opportunity to
get it before in any of my other English classes! It was a bit confusing to combine so much
feedback into a tangible plan on what I should change, but after that primary learning curve, it
was extraordinarily useful to know what someone else thought of my writing. My peers seemed

to enjoy the part in my first draft, where I am talking to my dad and telling a story, so I tried in
my second draft (even though we were required to anyway) to make the ENTIRE paper as
interesting of a story as possible. As you can see, their feedback greatly influenced my final
draft, which I am very happy with (see its page). In the second- to- final draft of my Lit Nar, Ms.
Ingram read it and only offered a few things to change, and said she was very impressed, which
made me very happy to see that not only was my hard work worthwhile, but that I apparently had
some skill with writing. It was quite encouraging because I previously had had little to no
encouragement on that. My final draft is the culmination of all my work, and I am quite pleased
with it, even though I didnt have time to write an entire new paper, like Ms. Ingram suggested.
This whole experience was helpful to me because in the past, not only had I had no feedback
before I turned in papers in High School, but because before this class, my writing process had
never really had much actual revising of drafts and editing papers, before. In the past, I tended to
simply write my first draft, edit it, and turn it in as the final copy, all in the same day. Being
forced to write, then come back to it with fresh eyes on a different day has really helped to open
my eyes to a new mindset of what a little more time can do for a paper. For example, my first
conclusion was nothing like the one in my final draft. I only wrote the being carried to bed thing
after I scrapped the wacky ending from my last draft.
In my Portrait of a Writer essay, I actually mention this writing ritual of mine, and how
I mostly free write to get my best work. I like how I said, that I often surprise myself as Im
writing a story, because I dont have a plan until I actually write that point. Its very true. In fact,
I hardly have ANY plan of how Im going to start before I start with the first sentence. The FPE
mind- map (process work) was mostly just for fun, to see if it would help me organize my

thoughts better. While it was still fun, it turned out not to help much, however, simply because
Im so scatter- brained and I have such messy handwriting. I found the portrait essay to actually
be rather useful, however, because it forced me to come to terms with some weird things about
my writing, like my appreciation for complexity, my idiosyncrasies in my writing style, etc
You actually can take a look at my improvisational writing process on the process work page.
There, you will see that I took some inspiration from Thacher and whatever student you
mentioned had done this before, and made a time-lapse of me writing, both of the screen, and
where I was. You will see that I still largely follow my old, perfectionistic writing style of
writing, editing, and redoing all at once, to get it as good as possible in my first draft. Of course,
Im not always on the go as I write I do my best writing at home, just sitting on a chair in
silence, as you can see in the other video, where Im sorting out my e- portfolio. By the way, my
free-write strategy where I just keep talking until all the topics are covered is something that I
actually needed to change in a recent video- making project for another class. My group had a
very strict time constraint, and our informational video had a lot of stuff to cover, so we really
had to condense our writing to make the video the correct length. The final video is on the wild
card page it took a lot of work, and I had to learn to overcome my wordiness.
Surprisingly enough, my reading and writing territories on that same page turned out to
be another learning experience as well more so than both my blogs and my midterm
combined! This may, in part, be because I treat all the big assignments, like papers, assignments,
etc. as though they are important projects, whereas I dont allocate as much time to try hard on
more- unimportant tasks like mini homework worksheets, blog posts, and such. Even still, I did
work probably harder than I should have on my blog posts, and I ended up saying some really

profound stuff, from time to time, analyzing psychology, or mentioning other interesting and
profound topics like if there really is no right or wrong way to write. I learned just a bit
more about applying myself, managing time, fitting pieces together, understanding people better
in group projects, and I enjoyed de- grading to degrading where it teaches about the
psychology of how people dont like to be FORCED to change, etc., but overall, the blog seemed
like just another assignment, to me, and had little meaning. My midterm was basically just a
longer blog post, in my opinion, so have little to add about it, either, except that it was good to
get some reassuring feedback from Ms. Ingram saying that I did indeed deserve the A I
wanted. As far as why my reading and writing territories were more meaningful to me, it is
because I had to try to remember and list out all of my writings that I was working on, and all the
books I had read and all the styles of things I was doing with writing It was rather shocking
how much reading and writing was, and still is, such an integral part of my everyday life, and it
is definitely pleasing to hear that Im actually OK ish at writing, considering the number of
novels Im trying to write I suppose the assignment just kind of forced me to step back and
take a look at my writing life in general, which recalibrate my mindset and gave me a slightly
more excited viewpoint about what we were going to do this year, since my previous english
classes were rather legalistic.
This class has certainly been different, and more fun, though, and I believe that despite
my previous assumptions about not having learned much, I actually gained more than I can even
know from this course, beyond just writing skills. Going back to the topic of writing habits and
how to improve writing productivity, because the conversation and thought process totally barred
me from easily slipping this back into the above section (See? Everything is connected, like a big

spiderweb, or the far- reaching roots of a tree!) RRL #4 was also very helpful in terms of
gauging my writing process and what it could be, and it offered some useful tips, like think[ing]
about the assignment in terms of the class as a whole, to quote page 144 in our book FROM my
RRL. (Double- quote! Because I feel bad for not having too many DIRECT quotes, instead of
conceptual or paraphrased ones, since they broke up the flow too much) I actually took
several of the tips and advices that he offered in that chapter, because they seemed really useful,
or because Id never tried them. As my RRL says, I actually found [this] chapter to be more
instrumental in life, rather than strictly for english, because clearly getting ANY project done
more efficiently is helpful, whether its a paper, or something else. In fact, beyond just that RRL,
but this whole class has helped to give a broader understanding of how lots of things fit together,
since we have read articles on and talked about psychology, modes of communications, how
things relate, etc., and has helped grow my ability to make connections Which is really what a
university is all about, isnt it? Fitting a wide variety of topics into a unified form of reason to
bring about unity from the diversity.
And finally, I would be lying if I said that I ONLY improved in things outside of writing,
so I really must mention the final artifact in my portfolio- The paragraph I wrote from Thachers
shoes. Of course, Ive written fictitiously from other points of view, in other accents, and even
other vocabularies But the assignment where Ms. Ingram told us to literally rewrite our group
member a new intro for their paper in their VOICE was something totally different, since
Thacher is not a fictional character that I can make up in any way I want. He is an actual person,
and he has his OWN voice, that I needed to match as best I could. This was EXTREMELY
difficult for me, because Id never needed to analyze a persons writing so carefully to be able to

figure out how they think, before Yet that was exactly what I had to do. I read and re- read
Thachers original paper several times, probably popping several blood vessels in my brain
before I finally managed to manually rewire my entire brain to think the way he though for long
enough to give him a new intro. It was one of the most difficult, yet interesting things Ive
ever done, and I kind of want to do it again someday Just to stretch myself so I can continue to
get even better, because this first time, I was willing to try, but it was definitely the time I was
most out of my comfort zone.
Why I should receive an A? A good question, to which I would respond Do you think
I deserve an A, considering that I did all that was required of me, I wrote well and even managed
to add new abilities to my arsenal, thereby improving, I worked really hard and engaged with
ALL 9 of the course key concepts at some point (not necessarily explicitly mentioned or listed,
but I did, and they should be easy to imply), I did my best to help my classmates do better by
giving feedback, and I learned many things about myself and the world?
I know Im about to begin my sentence with a conjunction, which you arent supposed to
do But if Shakespeare can make up words to fit his purpose, I can break rules too, here and
here. And on that note, I leave you, the reader, to enjoy the web of words and the world of
wonder that I leave behind in this portfolio. Thanks so much for stopping by to check out my
experience in UWRT 1101.