Tyra Heckstall

Dear Mr. Campbell and readers,

This E-Portfolio assignment symbolizes a timeline in my writing class. The

headers progress in order of essays that were assigned in class, starting with the first
assignment in which students had to write an introductory letter to Mr. Campbell, and
ending with the last assignment, in which students had to conduct a mini ethnography on
a particular group of people that interested us.
We have many in-class and out of class activities that we must complete. Every class day,
we do free writing activities in our daybooks. Free writing is exactly what it says, writing
in free style based on the topic that were given. This activity helps open our minds up
before class and give us a broader perspective of what lesson we may be studying. The
free writing could reflect on upcoming essay assignments we have, any questions that fill
up our mind, and other thoughts and ideas that we have to contribute to class. We also
have a personal blog for class in which we write about any assigned blog posts. Most
blog posts are videos from YouTube or TedTalk that we have to write a reaction to,
basically how did this video make us feel or what were our thoughts on the speakers
message. I enjoyed the blog assignments because I got this sense of freedom of speech
when reflecting in the blog entries about the videos. Another activity we do in class in
peer review. With writing essays, we were assigned peer groups. Peer groups serve the
purpose of reading over your partner(s) essays to assure of any mistakes. Peer review
always occurs about two to three days before our final draft of our essay is due. I believe

this activity has helped me in becoming a better writer and learned because hearing
feedback from my partner has showed me that its okay to make mistakes and we all learn
from our mistakes. My peer review partner actually sat down with me and read over my
essay and talked about what I could do to make this or that sound better or what I could
do to make the essay have a better flow. As far as in class readings, there has been times
where we would get into groups and discuss a reading that we had for homework. One
particular reading assignment that is clear on my mind was the assignment when we had
to get into groups of three and discuss the reading Miami Us Recreation Center, which
was ethnography. We were given questions along with the reading to answer in our
group. I believe group work is a good way of learning. Just like peer review, we get help
from classmates and take into their ideas as well as our own and combine those ideas
together to make a bigger picture.
I think my most important work in class was my literacy narrative essay. The
reason behind this is because the literacy narrative reflected on a past experience I had in
high school with writing. Writing about an experience can contribute to developing better
writing skills as well as intellectual skills because its personal. In the past, Ive always
hated writing because I couldnt quite get with the concept of the different writing styles
my English teachers introduced to me in high school. With my graduation project paper,
my confusion was reflected very well within the six pages I had to write about racism and
how it affects children in an educational and social environment. I failed the paper the
first time but did a lot better the second time. When I came to college, this class gave me
a better outlook on writing because Mr. Campbell lets us write exactly whats on our

minds. We arent compelled to write in a certain style or technique. We write in our own
style, which made all our essay assignments easy.
As far as strengths and weaknesses in writing in, my strengths in the past and now
is writing body paragraphs. I dont have a hard time meeting page number requirements.
When I start typing my body paragraphs, it seems like everything just comes to my mind
while Im writing and my papers show great detail of writing about the topic. My
weakness has always been starting off an introductory paragraph. There has been times
where I would sit at the computer for about twenty minutes and my introductory
paragraph would only be about two sentences. As of now, I still have that issue, but its
not as bad as it was before. Ive become a lot better at starting off introductory
paragraphs as a result of this semester.
There were three major writing assignments in the entire semester, Genre
Analysis, Literacy Narrative, and the Mini-Ethnography. The Genre Analysis was my
favorite writing assignment because of the topic it was focused on. We had to choose our
favorite genre and write about two movies in the genre. I enjoyed writing this essay
because it seemed very interesting and different from most writing assignments. It was
very fun and easy to write. Literacy Narrative was my 2nd favorite writing assignment
because it focused on a past experience that dealt The Mini-Ethnography was my least
favorite of the writing assignments. An ethnography is an essay that is based on
observations and interpretations of a group in our interests. I chose BSU, which is Black
Student Union, an on-campus organization aiming at the unity of black students. I believe
I found this writing assignment to be a little difficult because of the group selection I
chose and how long it took me to complete the essay. Observing was the hard part for me

with this assignment because BSU doesnt hold meetings very often so. I had to
remember as much as I could when it came down to observing a meeting before the
assignment was introduced. The next meeting that BSU had was the Tuesday before the
assignment was due and I already had my paper peer reviewed and didnt want to put that
extra stress on myself. I felt like if I would have chosen another group who met up more
than once a week, observing would have been a lot better as well as the assignment.
Overall, this class has helped my developed a new way of thinking critical
through blog assignments, free writing, peer review, group work, and writing
assignments. As a result of this class, I am a lot more confident with writing papers
because this class helped me recognize my strengths and weaknesses and what I need to
do to overcome any issues when writing a paper.