Maddy Karlick
Artifacts
The introduction paragraph in my first essay about fan fiction is a paragraph I am proud of. I feel that it is well written and contains a lot of knowledge and conversation within it. I was able to bring up a lot of good points about fan fiction and supply a lot of background knowledge of the topic. I talked about how the community of fan fiction has worked together to create a helpful environment and support each other greatly. This happened to be my first inductive essay that I have written and despite my essay as a whole leaning more towards deductive, I feel that my introduction was the more inductive piece in my essay. I was able to make my conversation flow and let my ideas wander. I brought up different ideas throughout the paragraph and showed different concepts. From this, I was able to better improve my second essay by trying to make the rest of the essay more like my introduction. This part of my essay is also a strong depiction of my style of writing. I do not always mean to be, but I am a generous writer and find it difficult to criticize in my writing. In my opinion, positive writing allows the reader to get more excited about what they are reading. If you want a reader to think your topic is fun and interesting, you should talk about it in a positive way. Using strong word choice and diction, I feel that this introduction paragraph is a strong example of my writing this quarter in English 101.
Essay one was not a strong inductive essay as I was too sure of my answers and did not add much tension to my work. Essay two allowed me to work on this and improve my inductive essay abilities. My conclusion in essay two in particular shows my improvement on inductive writing. My conclusion in essay one stated what I talked about in my essay and further proved the questions I was asking instead of asking more questions that added tension. In my second conclusion, I asked a series of questions that I could not answer and that I feel added a lot of tension to the conversation. I zoomed out and was able to look at the bigger picture of fan fiction as well as getting very specific and detailed about the questions I asked. Fan fiction in the future and the writers' outside lives came up as questions as well as specific questions such as does paying for internet and computers exclude fan fiction from considering itself an affinity space. I did not answer my thesis question of 'is fanfiction an affinity space?' and rather gave my points but then backed off to let the reader decide on their own, unlike in my first essay. I am proud of my second essay because of the progress I made and improving on what I wanted to improve on in my writing. I feel that because I was not a strong inductive writer to begin with because I gave conclusions to all my answers instead of leaving them open, having a strong inductive conclusion is something I should be proud of improving on.
One thing I had never encountered prior to English 101 was writing an essay without a prompt. Coming up with a prompt for an essay was difficult for me at first. I did not know where to begin on coming up with a solid question that was specific but general enough to write 5-7 pages on it. In class, we did a written discussion where we got in groups and wrote a thinking question at the top of the page and passed our papers around and everyone answered the question. This assignment helped me a lot by giving me ideas of how to come up with thinking questions and examples of questions. Answering other peoples' questions, I was able to see examples of good thinking questions and that helped me think of my own. After writing multiple essays where I had to think of my own questions and write my essay based off of my own prompts, I improved greatly and creating my CIQ's became easier and easier throughout the ten weeks in English 101. I feel like this will help me greatly in my next couple of years in college because I know I will have to come up with my own essay prompts sometime in the future.
I have never been that strong of a writer, especially revising and editing because I usually do not catch my own mistakes. Editing was something I always dreaded as well because I did not want to have to read my essay all over again. My dad or classmate would look through my essays for me and coming to college, I could not necessarily have my dad or ex-classmates edit my papers for me. It was nice, however, to have a suitemate who loves writing and has already taken English 101 through the running start program at her high school. She loves to write and offered to look through and edit my papers when needed. I took advantage of that and had her edit all of my papers before turning them in to make sure everything was worded well and everything flowed correctly. She caught mistakes I didn't notice and gave me advice on how to make my writing better such as adding transitions and better diction. I learned a lot from what she had to tell me and it made my essays much better. With her knowledge of writing good papers and being nice enough to edit them, my essays got better scores and sounded better overall. They transitioned better and used better word choice. She even gave me tips on how to edit my papers on my own which will help me greatly in the next few years in college. She taught me how to add transitions and substitute words with better ones. She also taught me how to make sentences flow better and get rid of redundant words. Helping me get better at editing and revising allowed me to make my essays much better and succeed in English 101.
In my R-P essay, I chose to start my essay with a narrative about my first day as a college student and how nervous I was. I talked about it being a new chapter in my life and being both excited and nervous for such a drastic change in my life. This genre allowed me to talk more personally about my life and get more in depth about how English 101 affected my life as a new college student. It allowed me to develop as a writer and be more confident about my writing in college because I knew that the feedback I was getting meant my writing was good enough for college level classes. I was nervous that the writing style I had been taught all throughout school was not going to be good enough and it was going to be hard to adjust to something new. I went on to write about how I used each technique in my writing and how they helped me become a better writer. I also included images to demonstrate framing and the iceberg to give the reader a better understanding of what I was talking about. The "story telling" genre of my essay allowed me to be more causal with my writing and more personal and I felt like it did not have to be so serious. This style was easy to write in and it allowed ideas to continuously flow and the essay came along quite quickly. I was able to get all of my ideas across and in a fun and creative format.
From day one in English 101, we have been talking about the final portfolio and have been working on it throughout the entire quarter. We have been writing essays to be included in the portfolio as well as learning writing techniques to include in our essays to make them better. I chose to keep a constant theme throughout all of my papers—fan fiction. Our first essay was required to be about fan fiction and it was a topic that I felt was easy to write about and had many different sides and ideas that you could go with in my essays, so I wrote about it in all of my essays. So, for my design in my final portfolio, I decided to post all of my essays and components as a fan fiction post. I thought it would be a cool and original design to present my portfolio in. I wanted the portfolio to relate to the content of my essays and bring everything together into one. I chose to submit my pieces of writing in the way I did because I wanted them to go in chronological order as well as go in the order that I have progressed. I have improved greatly since essay one by getting a better understanding of techniques and worked on diction and ideas. I wanted to start with my first pieces of work that were not so great than move on to my better pieces of writing.