Welcome to my Writing Portfolio!

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My Semester Reflection:

For the past five months, I have been partaking in an English Literature Composition class where I have written 3 major writing pieces. In this course, a regular writing class has been combined with a Russian Literature class to narrow our source of inspiration for our writings. As it is the end of the semester, I will take the time and reflect on my writing inspiration, process, and revisions. In this self-assessment, I will address the “behind-the-scenes”, my personal outlooks and afterthoughts of the different genres that I portrayed in my Literacy Narrative, Exploratory Essay, and finally my Critical Analysis.

To start off, I will first introduce “What’s the point of writing this?” also known as my Literacy Narrative essay. This was my first major writing piece in this course and as part of that, we took a more personal approach. The purpose of this essay was to write about a moment in our life that significantly impacted our writing. This was initially a hard to task to start as it was difficult to pinpoint a moment in my life that drastically changed my writing style. After much thinking and arguing with myself, I decided to choose a recent moment I experienced in senior year of high school that made me motivated towards writing. As I often struggle to get started with many of my writing assignments, I found myself really liking this one as it was more personal and it was something that I can recall rather than study, research, inform or argue. Regardless, I did find myself informing my audience as I hoped to explain to them my situation in relatable terms to persuade them. I intended on motivating them to continue writing since I knew a common problem amongst us students is to write a tedious school assignment as one of the main reasons is that we don’t see a purpose in writing it rather than for a grade. Which is why in my essay, I stated my initial frustrations to the reader and as the story progressed, I continued to share my interior thoughts and feelings. This method of being open and sharing the thoughts inside my head, helps me connect to the average student who most likely feels the same way and thus when I mention how my high school teacher helped me out with this problem, they will more likely than not, think and feel the same way.

Initially writing this, I felt very passionate to share my story which explains why my first draft exceeded the word limit by over 800 words! Although knowing I had a problem of being too excessive in detail, I still went into peer revisions confidently as I felt that this was a good problem to have. Both my group mates right off the bat had an astonished look on their faces from the initial glance at the length of my paper, and before even reading it they said I needed to take a couple of paragraphs out. When it came to do my revisions, shedding words off my story was more difficult than I had thought since there were many details that provided key visual aspects and important evidence to the overall understanding and relatability of my story. While rereading my story, I kept in mind the idea of keeping the details in line with the strict purpose of the article, as that was advice given to me by my professor during revisions. This idea helped a lot and although I wasn’t able to cut enough words to get my final draft within the word limit, I still managed to cut down about 650 words which I considered an accomplishment.

While rereading this essay, my outlook was a bit different having that I wasn’t in the moment any longer. I realized that I had good transitions from one paragraph to the next as my peers had pointed out to me during their review. Although I was the one who wrote this essay, I was left wondering what was going to happen next and didn’t feel like I was abruptly ending and starting a new paragraph. In addition, I felt that I had a creative and clever technique of showing the reader what I was thinking without having to repeat the words “I thought” which also forced the reader to remember this special strategy when I used it again towards the end. However, the one thing I do wish I could have done better was to use a better imagery or visual diction in order to really show the setting I was in and thus connect to them more. Although this was just a personal essay and I did not have to persuade or convince a certain topic, I still felt that since my problem (of not feeling motivated to write) was shared by many others, it would be amazing if they were able to gain back that motivation from my narrative. Which is also why the second thing I wanted to improve on was usage of “I” as I can see it’s a bad habit of mine. Although it was a literacy narrative, it looks like it was overused by me and separates me from the reader as they might not relate to my situation. Overall, I really enjoyed writing this piece and I hope that you do as well.

To my next essay, “The Art of 19th Century Russian Dueling” was a very complicated one as it was my first research paper done in college. For this essay, we were given a list of topics about Russian Literature that we can choose from and write about. The purpose of this essay was to strictly inform the reader about our respective topic. The popular topics on that list included love, gender conventions, adultery, and superfluous man. I decided that these were very fluid and opinionated topics for an informative essay and instead I picked a very factual topic which was 19th Century Russian dueling. I had chosen this thinking that I would not have trouble finding any notable sources as this was a solid part of Russian history so there should plenty of information out there. I was wrong. While starting my research process, at first search I found several sources with titles associated with my topic, however when it came to read them, they were unrelated to the idea I intended on portraying. Regardless, I eventually found most of what I was looking for and proceeded to write.  

Now, as an honest man, I will tell you that this essay was rushed and if you have read it already, then I thank you for your perseverance. I did not even look back at my essay until a week after I had submitted it due to the fact that I knew I had done a horrible job. Yes, horrible. Once I went back and reread this, I was ashamed in the many incomplete and unorganized thoughts that I had. Although I put it a lot of effort in conveying information about my topic as well as relating it to my thesis, it was obviously forced and all over the place. There was a lack of interest when I was researching for this essay, which lead to poor time management, and inevitably lead to poor execution of my ideas. This was clearly evident from the start of my introduction as it looked like one of my body paragraphs until the last sentence which was my thesis. I do apologize and take full responsibility of my work as this does not represent my best writing capabilities. Which is why I stepped it up in my critical analysis essay.

My final formal essay that I would like to introduce is “The Deterioration of Dueling”, which was also my first argumentative research piece. The purpose of this essay (as stated by the name) was to argue a specific point based on the understanding of our exploratory essay in a general sense. Given that this might not make sense (as it didn’t to me at first), I will put this in English. What was asked of us was instead of strictly informing our audience of a topic that was well known (as we did in our exploratory essay), we will now create an observation based on that topic and defend it by proving it through further research. Initially, I was stumped on what topic I was going to choose as we were also given the option of selecting a different topic and having that I didn’t do so well with dueling on my exploratory essay, I thought about changing it. After much thinking, I eventually found myself sticking with dueling since that was the topic I had most known about and it helped in figuring out an argument.

To discuss my argument for this essay I must also lay some context out. The idea of dueling was a very serious thing in the late 18th to 19th Century Russia. Initially inherited from France as part of Russia’s westernization process, this was more than just a fight, this is what determined a man’s honor and a man’s honor in a patriarchal society was pretty much everything. Along with the fight, Russia also inherited the set of rules that came with the duel that determined what actions were honorable and what were not. This was known as the Honor Code. The problem was the Honor Code was that it was very strictly enforced by the culture of the public (rather than the government who opposed it), which led to many duels and fatalities just so that a man can prove his honor. Now this is where my argument comes in, as I believe that the following of these rules was unnecessary as proved in several situations from the literature we have read across the course of the semester. Examples of this would be the Torrents of Spring and The Kreutzer Sonata, where the men have disregarded some, if not all, of these rules and still retained their honor. This I believe was a common flaw in the Russian culture and as well the modern-day interpretation of it, as many believe that the strict following of the duel and all its rules was the only way to retain honor. Now despite that it might seem that I had this argument well figured out, it wasn’t always like this.

From the moment I picked my topic, I struggled to pick an argument about dueling and if you have read my first draft, you can tell I had a very weak first argument. My argument was more of a statement about history rather than a controversial issue. I’ve took suggestions from revisions from my professor, Professor Cohl, as she advised me to pick a statement that’s not commonly accepted or well-known which is really what an argument is. Through much thinking, I was still indecisive on what my argument should be, I concluded that what made a huge part in my argument sounding weak was my wording. In my draft I phrased my thesis as “the strict idea of dueling was unimportant as the idea of honor was sought to be retained in a different method”. As you can tell that leaned more towards a general statement rather than an argument, so to change this I simply made this more confident sounding by changing the “was” with “is”. Surprisingly this made a huge difference in how argumentative my statement sounded. Now my debate was that “the strict idea of dueling is unimportant”. Despite the changing of the wording to improve my argument, there are more things that looking back I wish I had improved in my essay.

Rereading my critical analysis, I realized that although I had many positive qualities in my writing, there was also some negatives as well. From the start I found that my introduction was pretty solid as it started with a general statement (in this case a definition) and narrowed down to a specific statement about that definition. I also found that my transitioning was fluid as each paragraph ended with the alluding of the next, which I feel is always important in a long piece of text. In addition, my introduction to the evidence established great context. However, I do wish I could have addressed the 2 novels that I discussed in my essay at the end of my introduction to even further specify what I am talking about. I say this not only because it was a piece of advisement that my professor had gave me, but also because I feel that is helpful for the reader to know how the argument relates to the novels early on. However, I have a counter to this idea, I also think that given that the genre of our essay is an argumentative piece that’s mainly based on the argument and not on the stories, then the argument should come last in the introduction as there would be no need to introduce the books in there as we are discussing them later on. Speaking of counters, one thing that I wish I could have done better was add a counter-claim as that would have solidified my argument even further having that I addressed and disproved the opposing side. Another piece of improvement I would revise in my essay would be giving deeper analysis to my back-up evidence to my quotes. I felt as I did not thoroughly explain my evidence and skipped right to my concluding statement in most of my paragraphs. This is a crucial part of my argument and not thoroughly addressing it would have the potential to soften my claim and reason for picking my quotes. In addition to this, I would also like to improve is to convey my thesis in a better, refined, and unforced manner throughout my essay. I feel as if I was directly injecting my argument too abruptly and often to make sure the reader knows my stance, even though I could have calmly approached this in my analysis. Overall, I do feel that this was one of my best works as a writer and after initially not liking the topic I was writing about, I became an expert at it.

To wrap this off, I really feel that I have improved as a writer over the course of this semester as I became more concise with my wording and stronger with my relation to the purpose of my thesis. The difference between my first draft of my Literacy Narrative to my final draft of my critical analysis as well as this self-assessment is a pretty spectacular. Before I end this I would like to give a shout-out to my professor, Professor Cohl as my learning couldn’t have been possible without her comments and revision advice, so I want to thank her for that. I also appreciate if anyone of you took the time to read all this as I know that it’s pretty long and relatively personal. Thank you.