Ryan Sullivan.

Professor Frank Romanelli

WRT 104
December 21, 2015.
Across this semester, there have been many goals that each student was supposed to
reach. These goals included writing effectively, analyzing situations, improving the writing
process, and several others. Personally, I believe that I have met all of these goals in some form
or another. That might be an overly optimistic approach, but as we analyze my writing, I am
confident that I can prove that I have greatly improved over the course of the semester.
The first assignment that we did was the very first Time to Reflect, where we looked at
our own writing process. I gave a relatively long paragraph about what my process was like, and
how I wrote. However as the semester began and ran on, my writing developed exponentially.
The key was to understand what form of writing that I was using. Before, I just wrote. I was
careful to use my tenses correctly, but I never really looked at the science behind any of the
writing. But early in the semester we were given a test on the science of writing (I failed), but
from that test, I understood that writing was indeed a science. In the second to last time to
reflect that we had, number twelve, we were asked to look back upon our first time to reflect,
and to edit and revise it. The document clearly shows how much my writing has grown, as my
use of language is wider, but more importantly, there is a process. My process has now become
more formal than ever before, with more planning and work put into every piece. Generally
speaking, my work now is given an outline, with a clear direction that I would like to go. From
there, I use that outline and fill it in, until my final draft is born from the rough draft. In a sense,
everything gives birth to one another. My ideas turn into some topics, my topics into a rough
draft, and my rough draft is ironed out so it can become my final copy. It is a long and tedious
process, but as long as I follow it, my work is almost always high quality.
Another key aspect of this semester has been to use and to analyze texts effectively,
using a variety of sources. One of the goals for this class was to use the Library, the field, and

electronic sources effectively. All of those came together in my final essay on how video is
changing the world of journalism. In the works cited page, there are only five sources, which
might not seem like much. However, the sources come from a variety of different locations. One
of the sources is a web source, taken from the New York Times. This source is meant to
demonstrate how I can incorporate non-academic sources into my writing. There are four
additional sources that are academic however, and by using those I am demonstrating both that
I understand how to gather information, and how to put that information to good use within an
argument. The essay also talks about Philip DeFranco, and how he has millions of subscribers
to his channel. I consider that research to be field research, as there is no article or academia
written about it, it is just a source that I had to go find myself. My use of sources can also be
seen in my annotated bibliography, as I picked ten academic sources that I believed could
directly or indirectly help me in my final essay. Utilizing those sources, four of them directly, I
made a very concrete argument about how journalism was never going to be the same,
demonstrating my skills using, and skill acquiring these sources.
Feature 1, Final essay draft.
For my features in my portfolio, I chose two unorthodox pieces or writing, a draft, and a
comparison of two assignments. The first feature however, is my rough draft of my final essay. I
chose to feature this because it gives a very good piece of insight into the way I write and how
my process works itself out. The draft is very rough, with just a general direction being shown.
However, when I write a draft, I rarely write for content, but rather for ideas. During this phase, I
write to clear my head of anything that I think could work, and I write it down. My rough draft
does have a very broad and general direction, but there are not any facts. That is due to my
personal preference of having a very open and free draft, so that my ideas can be stimulated
internally. Comparing my draft to the final copy, most of the themes are the same, however the
order is different. In the draft I note how YouTube was rising as the newspapers were declining,
as well as how the Arab Spring Protests were of major importance in this shift to video.

However, one thing that I added into my final copy was the science section. During writing, I felt
that I was just making claims, and I needed something to back it up, so the science section was
developed. Writing is not linear, it needs to evolve, and it needs to progress. By showing and
comparing my final copy to my draft, I demonstrate the final three learning outcomes and
essential questions of this course. There was a peer edit session during this process (Frank, I
even showed you my rough draft), where I received very good input on where to go with my
essay. Using the peer review, I was able to formulate the structure of the final copy. Gathering
the data was easy as well, as I already had all of my academic sources lined up in our
annotated bibliography. In the final copy, they were added and used effectively to convey my
message. And finally I took a stand on where journalism is going. Journalism needs to adapt to
accept that citizen journalism is taking a hold, and that these companies now have outside
competition for the first time in history. My draft to final copy feature demonstrates much of what
this course expected of me.
Feature Two, Time to reflect one, and Time to reflect twelve.
Writing is communications. Without writing, we cannot convey our ideas, which is why
writing is so crucial to society. The best way to write effectively is to understand your own
writing, and to ameliorate it. That is what I have done with my first and last time to reflect that I
wrote across the semester. The first week of class we were asked to write about our writing
process. As it was the first thing that was asked of us, I understood that this would be a crucial
part of the semester in the course. In my first piece of writing for the whole semester, even all of
college, I openly admitted that I had no writing process whatsoever. My process was limited to
seeing a prompt, and writing about it. However, writing is unique in that it can always be
improved. The phrase you cant take back writing is very true, as writing is meant to last.
Writing can always be improved therefore, as you cant take it back. Writing will always be there,
which means there is always a chance to revise and to edit it. With Time to Reflect twelve, that
is exactly what I did. The prompt asked us if we still agreed with what we had written, and I

disagreed wholeheartedly. I had developed my senses and my feelings towards writing, and
made them better. The language and the content of the two pieces are completely different now,
with much of the first time to reflect now being what I would call wrong. My comparison between
these two pieces of work, the same prompt only months apart, proves that writing is very
transformative, both on paper, and in ones mind.