Marianne May Blando

AP Literature and Composition

Ms. Meghan O’Keefe

6 June 2018

Writing Portfolio Capstone Paper

Essays are majority of those school requirements that a student should never forget to

submit. The purpose of these essays is usually for teachers to assess how much the student

learned from the material taught in class. However, this purpose comes with an underlying

enrichment of a student’s critical thinking skills and language and composition skills.

Throughout my years in high school, I have written numerous essays. Not only was I able to

comply with the rubrics, but I was also able to improve as a writer and a reader. Basing off from

my writing portfolio, I believe that I improved on filtering out my sources, exploring and

analyzing the texts we read, and putting my ideas in an organized and insightful manner.

Having sources to refer to in an essay makes the essay more persuasive, and it gains

credibility. An essay may contain numerous sources, but the quality of the sources will be a

determining factor to the quality of the entire essay. It is important that quotes and pieces of

“evidence”, especially the ones that can be found online, come from a known but legitimate

website. Also, it is important that the website and/or the authors are experts. In my piece ​The

Declaration Essay​, I wrote about how the American ethos changed over the course of time. I

noticed that one of my strengths is to integrate real life experiences and current events in my

essay. However, I was not able to put in-text citations, and the websites I referred to were
magazines that focus on show business and pop culture. This can be seen in the second

paragraph which said, “Celebrities like Colton Haynes, Neil Patrick Harris, and Michael

Angelakos of Passion Pit expressed their gay pride and are surely happy to be who they really

are.” In comparison to my ​Critical Reading Journal Analysis​, the quotes were properly cited, and

the essay was mainly focused on ​Jane Eyre​. Because of this focus on ​Jane Eyre​, the reader is not

bombarded with information and is able to see the connections of the happenings in the story line

and Bronte’s syntax.

Since I took AP English Literature and Composition in my senior year, there had been

significant improvements on how I analyze and extract the message of our readings comparing to

how I analyzed texts in my previous years in high school. It stuck to my mind that the best way

to analyze a reading is to identify first its theme. Then from the theme, we can build off and

support it with textual evidence. For my literary analyses in my writing portfolio, I saw my

growth as a reader and writer by comparing ​The Lost Generation Literary Analysis​ and ​Heart of

Darkness Literary Analysis​. In both of the first paragraphs of these essays, I followed the

claim-evidence-reasoning format wherein I used the theme or a general idea as my claim. For

The Lost Generation Literary Analysis​, I stated, “The writers had their own writing style, but the

characteristic in their literary work that classified them as a writer in this time is having a cynical

view of life, the American society and America itself” (par. 1). As for ​Heart of Darkness

Literary Analysis​, I claimed that “Heart of Darkness shows the struggle in one’s psyche of

having to conform to a greedy external source” (par. 1). With these, I was able to keep control of

my train of thought, and these claims served as the backbone of my essays.

 After having established the backbone of my essay, I had to consider how I will present,

arrange, and organize my ideas. As mentioned before, it has been a habit of mine to include

pieces of background information and integrations to current events. Although the essay

becomes more substantial and relatable, I saw the need to control the inclusion of outside

information. ​The Declaration Essay​ was written in the first quarter of my junior year. I have

mentioned in the previous paragraphs that this particular piece had several references to outside

sources. I think the outside sources were all over the place, and as time went by, there had been

an improvement. There was more control on the way I wrote about the outside sources, and this

improvement can be seen in ​Living Life Under 10 Rules​ and ​Will Fear Cause Change?​. For these

essays, I included references to ​Justice: What’s the right thing to do?​, ​Their Eyes Were Watching

God​, ​The Crucible​, McCarthyism, and the Philippines’ war on drugs. Despite the dense

information from numerous sources, the connections between them were fully explored and were

firmly presented. I believe this is because of how I wrote transition sentences before I moved on

to another paragraph. An example of this is when it was stated in ​Will Fear Cause Change? ​that

“although the aforementioned political conditions happened in the past, they are still encountered

by some people of today” (par. 4). After this sentence, I introduced the Philippines’ war on drugs

in connection to the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism in the 1950s.

With all of these, I can say that I have developed my skills in reading, analyzing, and

writing about literature. Taking an AP class and preparing for the AP exam had helped and

challenged me to truly maximize and push through my abilities. I used to be intimidated by

complex texts, but now I have gained confidence in my skills as I got exposed to more activities

that required the use of my critical thinking skills. Connecting literature and actual events is one
of my strengths, and this is one of my traits as a write that I think I will carry over to college. We

were taught to properly cite sources; therefore, I predict that plagiarism will not be a problem.

Although I have improved so much on analyzing texts and organizing ideas, I believe I will

continue to improve these skills when I get to college. Higher education requires more practice

and exposure to complex texts, so I will not settle to these skills I have worked on in high school.

The learning never stops after high school.