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Ashley Ikerd

ENGL 1302

Professor Lawson

27 February 2017

Portfolio

My experience in English 1302 has been far from easy. Not only was it in half the time as

a regular sixteen-week college course, but it was also strictly online only so you must be

internally and externally self-sufficient. With having peer and instructor reviews for our journals,

four short academic reader response papers, and three major essays in such a short amount of

time, most of the time the assignments were overlapping making it difficult to be time

manageable and efficient in format and in presentation. This lead to a few positive and a few

negative outcomes of my professional and personal writing. To be specific, there were three main

errors throughout my writing when doing assignments that I have noticed.

First, I have learned that I need to work on my sentence structure and grammatical errors.

From multiple comments on various assignments, I tend to have some quite lengthened run-on

sentences. I need to work on word choice for cutting those sentences without causing fragments

in my writing. I believe I can improve my writing abilities by building my vocabulary. That way

I can choose the correct terms to use throughout my college essays and in personal writing in the

future, as well.

I have also learned that constructive criticism can be helpful when constructing a writing

assignment. Essays not only need the words you write, but to be able to develop a well written
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paper, one also needs feedback and possibly minimal guidance from their peers, colleagues, and

from their instructor. A well written article cannot and usually is not, from what I have learned

throughout the length of this course, developed by the writer alone. My most difficult essay by

far, was the proposal argument that I wrote over the topic of online dating. Unfortunately, I did

not get much feedback from my peers throughout this course and in my opinion, I believe that if

I would have gotten any substantial feedback with suggestions, that maybe I could have made a

decently better grade on that assignment. With this statement comes time management. I also feel

that possibly, it could have been because I submitted my peer and instructor review journals only

a few days before the due date of the assignment, that the other students did not have time to read

through my work and therefore, could not formulate a substantial review and provide me with

feedback.

The final and most important error that I have consistently made throughout the majority

of my assignments has been styling the MLA format correctly. Honestly, I am not 100 percent

positive where I have gone wrong with this format in my college papers for this semester, mainly

citing the papers in the text itself, but it has made me aware that I need to work on being more

observant of the new MLA 8th version format.

As we are approaching the end of the course semester, I feel that I have taken away a few

new writing skills such as conducting a proposal argument, which proven my grade that I still

need to work on, and formulating a paper that does not allow my opinion. I am aware that as my

classes develop, I will need to improve my time management skills in order to provide enough

time for prompt feedback, but this class, with the assignments and due dates that were provided,

has helped me better acquaint myself with communication as a whole. Without effective

communication, there becomes a barrier that does not allow additional ideas to be provided in
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making an individuals statement or argument enough value to be potentially credible. I believe

that with enough effort and practice, I can develop my communication skills, written and verbal,

for the future because of all that this class has taught me.