Casey Tran Portfolio Reflection

Although writing isn't a big part of my intended major of computer science, I learned a lot from taking !C ""#$ and belie%e the %arious styles of papers, research, and discussions ha%e taught me enough to help out in my field& The writings taught me a lot about papers different from the common argumentati%e or informati%e structure of papers that are usually re'uired for english classes, which ended up being difficult to write for me at first& The annotated bibliography and literature re%iew was especially interesting for me in terms of finding a focus point, since computer science is a topic that has been %ery thoroughly e(plored& I think I deser%e an A for this class based on how consistently I actually did the work, and e%en though it's not e(actly a measureable %ariable, the amount of knowledge I learned and was able to apply to my writing& The discussion boards warranted a good amount of thought on a couple subjects& I found the discussion on sponsors of literacy, one of the first ones we did, to be a fa%orite& Posts that are opinionated or contain good 'uestions are interesting to read, especially when others ha%e conflicting opinions or counter 'uestions& %an and )elen's posts on *randt's +,ponsors of -iteracy+ helped me to think about the topic a bit more&

The topic of study that I chose for the major papers in this class e(cept for the genre study is one that I'%e been interested in for a good amount of time& ,ince my genre study was focused on a different topic, I didn't ha%e a plan at first for computer science, but as I finished papers, I 'uickly saw how each paper came together in relation to each

other& ,ince computer science isn't e(actly a standard field literature wise, I think the research papers ha%e gi%en me insight on how possible papers in the future might need to be written&

The literacy narrati%e was intended to show insight on growing up as a writer, and how literacy sponsors played a part in my de%elopment as a person& The literacy narrati%e also happened to contain part of the reason I chose computer science as a topic for the following papers& It was tough writing about myself at first, because I don't consider my upbringing in the literature field anything special, but after peer re%iew and some re%isions, I was able to find a point to lead up to and focus on and tie my paper together better than pre%ious drafts& I think the peer re%iew in this paper was especially helpful& The peer re%iew letter felt a lot more personal and direct rather than normal workshop re%iew, and I think I was able to take a lot more out of it and impro%e on the correlating paper& I think this paper shows a good amount of progress on accepting and applying peer re%iew to a paper to impro%e it& .or the genre analysis, I hadn't yet decided to focus on computer science, and chose instead a different topic I also found interesting, mythology& I chose this subject more because I'%e always liked it rather than thinking about the practical ease of using it in the paper& I think choosing computer science initially here would ha%e been much easier on myself and easier to connect to the other papers, but I enjoyed doing the genre analysis %ery much& Peer re%iew for this was a little tough, considering that the peer re%iewers only had a couple pages of the beginning of the epics to reference& There was a lot of info that I researched separately about what the poems had in common and such, so

it might ha%e been tough to think of if there was enough information or if that was the e(tent of it& The annotated bibliography was an interesting paper to write& It was the first paper I ha%e written that doesn't use a straight forward format like the others& I had trouble starting out on deciding a specific topic, since I choose computer science as the general topic& I narrowed down my topic after looking into a couple articles on the subject& After I had compiled all the articles and written the annotations for them, the paper was actually surprisingly easy to write& Peer re%iew mostly included things I needed to be more specific about, such as detailing methods used in annotations& ,eeing and reading other e(amples of annotations was a great help for this paper& The literature re%iew and project proposal was also an interesting paper to write& I really enjoyed seeing the research part of the class come together after working on the project proposal& Completing the lit re%iew and project proposal really connected the class for me in terms of how the papers work together& /%erall I don't think some of my drafts show the amount of progression that I feel I obtained, simply because I wrote the drafts in a skeleton style, not e(actly completely full of content& The drafts, howe%er, were also a big part of the progression for me& Procrastination and getting my thoughts onto paper were pre%iously especially tough problems for me, and I feel like I had a major impro%ement through the semester that will especially help in the future&