Dear Ms.

Wright, When I started creating my E-portfolio, I began by looking back on all of my work from the class, starting from the beginning. It was amusing to look back at the things I wrote during the first few class periods and how much my knowledge and opinions have changed since then. Some of my opinions are still the same though; Im still not a fan of writing and writing assignments! From the second I signed up for English 1102 on registration day, I was dreading it. I havent had an English class that I have actually enjoyed since middle school or maybe even elementary school. The class was required though, so I knew Id have to suck it up. Which I did! Finally, Im nearly done with the E-portfolio! I cannot even express how relieved I am. I am actually proud of myself looking back at the E-portfolio and my Wordpress account. I know all of these new things about communities of practice, Discourse, Genre, Rhetoric, and even more about mental health and suicide! I have to be honest though, I still disliked the class and the readings. I dont think Id go through it all again if someone paid me. Now that it is pretty much over though, I am incredibly glad that I took the class and got to learn all of this new information about writing. I feel much smarter and more informed. This class and the assignments have caused me extreme stress and anxiety, which has probably taken a few years off of my life, but I am still grateful. One of the main aspects of my E-portfolio and the part that I had the most fun doing was when I went back to my old reading responses and blog posts from the beginning of the class. I picked the posts that I felt that my knowledge has expanded the most on and I basically wrote a letter to myself saying What I wish I knew then! It was actually quite humorous reading some of the things that I thought was right that was really so completely wrong. When we were first required to provide examples of a few of the communities of practice

that we thought we were a part of, I said that nannies was one of those communities of practice for me, since I am a nanny. Looking back on that now, I feel pretty ridiculous, because I know that that is the opposite of a community of practice. I rarely ever interact with other nannies to work towards a common goal. I have a few friends that are nannies as well, and of course we all have the goal of being good role models to the children, but that is hardly a community of practice. We dont even see each other very often. I feel that a few of the aspects of my inquiry project were my most important work in my opinion. When I was doing my research on mental health and suicide, I learned a lot of new information about those topics and I feel lucky that I got to become a part of a community of practice that means so much to me. My interview was probably my favorite part of the whole process. As you know, I interviewed a 22 year old who lost his brother to suicide, and meeting with him really touched me. It has further inspired me to devote my life to helping people who are suffering from a mental illness. I also really enjoyed doing my genre adaptions, particularly the collage. The adaptions connect to my goals as a writer because it taught me to be more abstract about my writing. After reading the article on the Five Paragraph essay, I really wanted to get away from the standard essay format. Even though I knew I wanted to do this though, I still struggled with it, and turning my paper into a work of art (the collage) forced me to see the creativity of writing in a whole new light. I now know that visual art and writing can have the same meaning and goals, and we just have to figure out the right way to make that happen. The interview also taught me how to use a verbal conversation towards a formal essay. I have never done something like that, so it was interesting and beneficial to learn how to bring someones personal story into an argumentative essay.

The readings have opened my eyes to a whole new side of the writing world that I have never even thought about before. I have always just written papers, not sat around and thought about why I was writing what I was writing and analyzed the rhetoric and rhetorical situation. I have always known about genre and that different types of genres exist, but I never actually spent time thinking about genre. Now I find myself thinking about genre in everyday life regarding all things. One day I even had a conversation with one of my friends about adapting her marketing project into a different genre in order to better convey her message. She looked at me like I was crazy but then ended up taking my advice! Its funny, because honestly when I first read most of the readings I thought they were pretty stupid and I was convinced that they would never apply to my life, and now Im thinking about them in my spare time! I understand why you made us read these articles and it is obvious that you spent time carefully selecting them. I have always believed that peer review and constructive criticism is very important. The peer review in this class just strengthened my belief in that. I have learned so much information and formed a lot of new opinions by interacting with my peers in this class. Everyone has been really helpful and insightful. Even recently when I was working on my E-portfolio, I went and checked out some of the things that my classmates had posted on their E-portfolios and Wordpress accounts. It is insane how much new information I learned just from doing that! We all have different minds, and we have all interpreted things differently. I feel very fortunate that I had classmates that were extremely helpful and kind. Our classroom interaction was very important and I know that I wouldnt have learned nearly as much without it. I feel like I faced challenge after challenge over the course of the semester. From day one, I have struggled with the technological aspect of the class. I really think technology is out to get me sometimes, because it always screws me over at the last minute. Learning how to

navigate Wordpress, and then having to figure out how to navigate wix and weebly took up so much of my time that sometimes I felt like I didnt have enough time to spend on the actual material. I ended up switching to Weebly even though the rest of the class was using Wix because I found it a lot easier to navigate. I have always seen the importance of the integration of the technology in our classroom though and I am glad that I eventually figured out how to use those websites! Im sure that I will have to create an E-portfolio for something in the future and it will be much easier now that I know how to do it. I also felt that one of the challenges in this class was the time constraints. We had so much work to cram into one short semester that I didnt feel like I had enough time to go as deep as I wanted to in some areas. It has taught me to manage my time better though. Overall, I didnt enjoy the class, but I enjoy what I learned from it. I feel like I have really grown as a writer and that I will be much more successful in writing as well as in other areas of my life because of what I have learned in this class! I truly enjoyed working with the community of practice that we formed in our classroom. It was great to take a college course where everyone worked together so nicely, especially since Im used to large lecture classes where the students rarely have the opportunity to interact. Thank you! Sincerely, Emily OConnell