Portfolio: Reflective Letter

As a new student to Puget South Early College, I was very nervous to take college level classes. I was so afraid I might have messed up or misunderstood, especially the writing class which I worried the most. To me, writing is always a way to express my feelings and thoughts, just like write an angry letter when I am mad, and make up a song or poem when I am happy. There is no limitation for me in writing. Maybe there are some mistakes I always make but as long as I can be creative and express it freely, I do not think there will be anything problems. But at beginning of the class of Writing 101, my style of writing did not work well. Since I am an ESL (English as Second Language) student, an immigrate and not an English native speaker, the language is my weakness, but as the class went on I learned what I need to write a good essay by reading my classmates’ essays. The two essays that I have prepared for this portfolio will show my changes of writing style in a good way from my writing experiences in this class.
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I did not do well on my first essay since I had never write a college essay before and always practiced writing in ESL level in the ESL class. To tell my strength on my first essay which is the “Bacon’s Rebellion”, the only two things I was good at were to describe what was happening during that time and compared it with the modern world. As a new student to the college with a little weak English skills, I did not get what am I suppose to do with the essay, so I did it the way that I used to write for my ESL essays, and it did not work. And the weaknesses I had on this essay were not having enough historical evidences, quotes, clear arguments , good hook , and some grammar mistakes. The most important part I made mistake was not giving a good theme, which did not show a clear argument. So what I did was keeping the most important and useful information and rewrite other parts. I added my voice of argument, give quote, changed a hook and focus more about my topic since I was out of topic at first time. And I believe the revised version of first essay will show a huge difference from the original one.
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On my second essay, I did a better job because it was a partnered essay. I was glad to work with my partner. I gave him my ideas and words, and he fixed and wrote it down for me, so this essay actually looked smoother then my first essay. It was an essay about a loyalist having an interview with a patriots, and I believe my partner and I brought out good questions for each other to explain each side’s situations. And the only weaknesses we had was a little mistake on the grammar and did not have a good citation, because instead of giving a citation to our source we gave an annotation. So I fixed the grammar and used a website called “ esaybib” for the citations. There was too much things to change around on the second essay, but after fixing it, it looked a little bit better.
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For my final, I think I did a good job because I tried my best and used what I have learned in this class. I know it might not be prefect, but to me it was the best work I have ever done this quarter. I was a little bit in hurry so I made a lot grammar mistakes, but I printed out a copy for myself to correct my mistakes right after the test. And this time, I might have a good hook and showed a sense of understanding the quote. And it is pretty much the end of the quarter, I learned how to focus and not to be off the topic, and more understanding of how to use historical evidences on the essay to support my argument. Over all, I learned more about college writing and grew from the ESL writing. I am glad I took this class which will help me to prepare for writing essays in the future and got a sense of how might the classes look like if I was in a class of big number students in a university.