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Krishna Polasani Ms. Ingram English 1102-024 5th December 2012 My Transition in Writing Over the semester in English 1102, there was a combination of different writing styles with supplemental assignments such as cover letters and blogs which greatly improved the writing process. The structure of the class allowed for each student and the instructor to clearly notice the growth in each writer including myself. My authored works were shown through a website known as Weebly and set up in mostly chronological order. The reason behind the structure of the website was based on the fact that producing my works in this certain way allows me to explain my growth as a writer as the semester progressed. In addition, I included the writing process for some of my composed works which portrays the difference between the final and interim drafts. Before the big writing assignments are portrayed, there are a few assignments that must be explained which paved a way to my assignments over the semester. One of these includes an introduction letter which I produced on my first day of class. In the letter to my instructor, I describe my strengths, weaknesses, and goals for the semester. My strengths included my range of compositions of objective writing and my liking of subjective writing. My weaknesses which later transfused into my goals include transitions and flow of writing. These are my two main goals and a supplemental goal of improving my vocabulary at the same time. The second assignment was being able to read Peace, Butter, and Jelly and meeting its author David Mark

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Seidel. Through these two assignments, it resulted in me to establish the semesters thematic question: What does it mean to be healthy? My focus turned into choosing something I enjoy learning about and portraying information to benefit others. These two assignments set the tone for the rest of the semester. The first big composition was known as the What is it like to be you or WILTBY essay. This essay allowed me to write about myself, something I enjoy writing about. But I learned a lot of information about my own writing. Firstly, I am inherently a reflective writer, one of my strong suits in writing. Secondly, I learned the importance of the writing process. After writing papers upon papers, in which there was no peer editing, I never learned the importance of it. Through this paper, I have received comments on my paper from a peer and later an instructor which aided my paper substantially. Through peer editing, it allowed me to see a point which I thought was clear, was not clear enough to the readers. It allowed me to make substantial changes in the second page of the WILTBY essay which is shown in Weebly and some parts quoted below. .. Throughout my life I have been surrounded by many people whom I look up to. Some of the people whom I look up to are a part of my family and extended family but a few of them are my friends and teachers. Their stories about their past which I have heard from different people and viewed through the past eighteen years have shaped my admiring views of them. One of these influential people is my uncle. There are many stories in which I can share from the things I learnt from him. But, one of these stories occurred a few months ago. He was leading an event for a week which composed of 1750- 3500 members each day. Those seven days were very tiresome, hectic, and sleepless for many people there, including him and me. But never did I hear I remark about his physical state or see a change in calmness in that week. He really

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enjoyed what he was doing and positive effects of his work and therefore did not have a negative attitude toward it. Through these changes it provided a few more examples and more importantly lead me to better explain the lessons that made me who I am, the topic of the paper. And the last thing I learnt through the WILTBY essay was trying to use different writing styles while taking risks in your writing. Never before WILTBY essay, did I include supplemental writing such as poetry in an essay. For the first time, I took a risk in my writing by including poetry at end my essay. Through self reflection and comments received from my peers, the poetry added a finishing touch to the essay. The response from that poem helped me focus on composing different styles and preserved me to take risks while writing. As a result of that poem, I tried to make a goal of taking risks in my writing over the semester because it may pay off in your writing. Then the next assignment was the annotated bibliography. The annotated bibliography was research tool for the research essay. Through completing the annotated bibliography, not only did I know a lot more information about my topic but it also helped distinguish between information I already knew about and information I just learned through research. But the annotated bibliography was a key opportunity I missed to improving a component of my writing: improving my vocabulary while keeping the flow of the paper. The basic purpose of the annotated bibliography was to absorb information and writing into ones own words. I clearly served its purpose but if I added greater flow and vocabulary in this writing assignment into my own words, it would have caused a domino effect into slightly bettering my three sided argument and research essay.

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One of the hardest assignments of this semester for me was the three sided assignment because I had to partake in the minds of different groups of people of the different issues of meditation and yoga. After researching on these different groups of people, I had to find a way to seed out my point of view while explaining the other points of view. This was harder than expected because I was invested in my topic for such a long period of time. In addition, I had to distinguish three completely different people rather than people who just oppose my topic. As you can imagine, the first draft was far from similar to the final draft. The changes among the drafts were greater than any other paper I have ever composed. But regardless of the magnitude of difficulty of this assignment for me, I still feel I did a pretty god job due to the fact I have changed it so much from start to finish. One of the main reasons that many changes occurred throughout the stages of writing were because of cover letters. Cover letters were always a key component of my English 1102 class, but I found them most useful in the three sided essay. Thus why I included the cover letters in my weebly. For my cover letter one, I described how difficult it was to choose three different viewpoints of meditation and yoga rather than choosing viewpoints opposing my topic. I changed the issues I had in my cover letter one in my draft two. Then while I was rereading draft two, I noticed that I inherently supported my argument in cover letter two. This caught the intention of the audience including Ms. Ingram who felt that supporting my argument was not necessary. I felt that was true and revised my paper to seed out where I was supporting my argument throughout the paper. Right before I began to compose the final research essay, there were in-class assignments which helped me in improving my writing skills as a whole. These two assignments included a warm-up on describing what is good writing and a reading why is eating well elitist. Through these two assignments, it portrayed to me that there is no certain format for formulating a well

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developed essay. This changed my view on writing that there is only a certain format for composing a research essay and caused me to take some risks on the research essay as described in the next paragraph. This learning opportunity will probably result in helping me much more in future research essays. Finally after a nearly semesters worth of research and assignments, I composed my research essay. This research essay was far from any of the other research essay I gave written before. One of the main reasons for this is how I formatted the essay. In the essay, I introduce my topic and describe evidence supporting my thesis. Then contrastingly to any of my other research essays, I embedded in personal experiences surrounding meditation and yoga which resulted in the betterment of my essay. This is an example of the risk I took in my writing this semester. Regardless, I think the risk paid off because it allowed me to effectively support my thesis while creating logos, ethos, and pathos in the reader through personal examples. The structure and placement of personal experience was crucial because after establishing that I have concrete knowledge of the subject, then and only did I place my personal experience. As a result, I build up ethos in the audience allowing them to trust me and then the reader receives an example of firsthand experience by the author, me. After I composed my first few drafts, I had a peer editing session with my group and Ms. Ingram. I thought a group peer editing session was vital for me in this process. After composing my thoughts in the structure I thought was best there were two main things to focus on. These two things were grammar and does my paper provide enough examples to prove the supporting arguments I make throughout the paper. Reading out loud to my audience was a great tool for noticing grammar errors throughout the paper. It was also a great tool for my peer editors to show me if I spent too much time on a certain aspect of the paper compared to another. As

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shown on Weebly, I included page five of my initial draft showing the grammar and MLA format errors I made while adding a few more statements supporting my thesis in pen. After reading the first whole paragraph on that page, I and my editors thought it was necessary to add a few more statements to the paragraph giving more information on mediation classes. It was a great opportunity to talk about the different types of meditation classes offered which was a topic I missed in my first draft. Adding this information was quite informative to the reader. Therefore, though the help of the group session, I noticed I skipped a whole subtopic which I included in my final draft and quoted below. ..There are different styles, courses, and levels that different meditators and yogis can choose from. The courses are set up in increasing difficulty by different styles. Some of these styles include breathing meditation, movement meditation focused meditation, and spiritual mediation. Lastly, another elemental tool written over the course over the semester was blogger. During the course of the semester, there four blog posts which showed forth my growth as a writer. The blog posts also discussed about some of the main concepts of this class which were critical thinking, independent inquiry, responsibility for ones own learning, curiosity, risktaking, the writing process, providing and receiving feedback, and intellectual growth and maturity and how they affected me personally. As a result, I included a URL of my blogger on Weebly to which also portrays my growth as a writer. All in all, after reading and changing each of many of the essays described earlier for at least three times each, I am pretty confident with each of the final products shown on weebly. As described earlier, each assignment was different allowing me to write in various forms of writing

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while taking some risks. One of the reasons for my confidence was my participation in the writing process. In every writing assignment, I took the necessary steps to take advantage of the workshop opportunities. For example, every time a first draft was due I had the whole essay written. This allowed me to be on top of the assignment and really helped me and others when analyzing my paper. As a result, a domino effect was created into the next few drafts, making the paper better each time of the process. Thus, why I believe my portfolio came together pretty well. The topics of meditation and yoga were topics I have been invested and interested for a long time and already have some knowledge regarding them. As a result, a combination of my interest in the topics and my work during the continuous writing process lead me to consider this was my best effort and one of my best works as a whole. One of main things that lead me to my successes in the classes is my participation inside and outside the classroom. In addition with being prepared by having different drafts on time, I had the different readings done on time leading me to receive a 100% or greater in each of the two quizzes. My attendance was good which allowed me to be engaged throughout the class, in class and small group discussions. In conclusion, if I were to rate myself during the course of the semester, I would give myself 9.2 to 9.5 in a rating scale of 10. This would give me about an A in the standard grading scale. There are many reasons for giving me such a rating some of which are described in the last paragraph. In addition, I took into consideration the mid-semester instructor analysis. My work ethic has stayed the same if not became better since then and I genuinely believe I have changed dramatically as a writer which I have described throughout the essay. Contrastingly, I did hit some bumps along the way. One such example was my inability to take the opportunity of improving my vocabulary while keeping the flow of the paper in my annotated bibliography. I inherently just rewrote the information I learned into my own words rather than taking the time

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to make it sound a little more sophisticated as I would do in a normal essay. Additionally, I really did not give my full effort on some of the first few cover letters. At first, I did not see the point of them but later, I learned the importance of the cover letters and tried my best on each one of them from then on. Regardless of theses bumps, I still believe I deserve the grade described earlier. My work ethic over the semester and my analysis of the growth of myself as a writer over this semester is not greatly hindered by the bumps described earlier. All in all, the comparisons shown on weebly between some of the earlier drafts to the final draft and the comparisons between the first WILTBY assignments to even this portfolio essay portray my exponential growth as a writer.