Madelyn Lopez                                                                                 11/26/18

                                           Portfolio Self-Reflection  

    The writing processes for all of the essays I have written throughout the semester was a challenging journey. The essays that I wrote were an identity narrative, a descriptive,  a critical analysis essay. Many challenges came along the way when writing these essays, one being to make sure that my essay had a proper flow to it. All the information I am putting down is making sense to my reader, and that the information is relevant to the topic. In addition, turning my thoughts into actual writing that makes sense is also a challenge that constantly shows up when writing my essays, because I did not know how to organize my writing. The use of revision and editing has helped me refine my writing.

    For all of the essays, I changed the structure multiple times. For example, in my identity narrative essay I was writing about two moments that shaped my identity, migrating to America and being bullied in school, I was supposed to write about one. This caused my readers to be confused because I was going back and forth between two moments in my life. My ideas were all over the place, so I had to move them around to places where they made more sense.

   In my descriptive essay, most of my paragraphs were disorganized because I had too many topics in one paragraph instead of breaking it apart. I was describing my mother’s looks, smell and the way she acts all in one paragraph. After I broke up these topics into different paragraphs, everything was well structured and was making more sense than before.

   I had the same problem when writing my critical analysis essay, the first body paragraph of my essay had too many topics inside. I was talking about vouchers, extracurriculars, class sizes and many other topics that did not all go together. I fixed this mistake by taking out some of these topics out of the first paragraph and making it its own paragraph where it would make more sense. For instance, I had to put the class size topic in its own paragraph, where I was able to find evidence to support and analyze that private schools having smaller classes is a good thing. Separating these topics into different paragraphs gave my reader a better understanding of the point I was trying to get across, instead of having to jump around to different topics.

   My peer review group played a big role in helping me find the solution to the mistakes all of my essays had. They helped me by writing down comments and suggestions, such as where transitions words could be added, grammar mistakes, irrelevant information, where evidence was missing and lastly, where more analysis could be added. Everything my peer review group added to my paper was extremely helpful in making my essays better. In most of the essays, I lacked transition words, this disrupted the flow of  my essays . Instead, I added some of the transitions words my peer review group suggested where they were extremely needed. I added words like, for example, for instance, in contrast to, as a result etc. They helped me developed strategies that were helpful in my editing and revision process. Some editing strategies I learned with my peer review group were keeping an error log. This helped me identify the problems with my paper in an organized way. This also made it easier to find common mistakes in other essays because I already knew the errors I was looking for. In addition, I learned to review my paper for one type of  error at a time. This strategy helped me looked at my essays in an organized matter because I was only looking for one error instead of looking for many at a time.

   These revisions and editing strategies that I developed throughout this course, I was able to share with the rest of  my classmates during the presentation I had to do. This was an important topic to discuss because revision and editing are two major factors that should be used significantly, before turning in your final draft.

  Overall, I learned a lot from writing all of these essays. I came across many learning outcomes, one that specifically focuses on revisions and editing. Throughout these essays I had to a lot of both revision and editing. To start, I had to look over all of my peer review comments and suggestions to know where my mistakes were and figure out how I was going  to fix them. After looking over my paper in the perspective of my peer review group I was ready to begin my editing process. The first thing I did when I began to edit my final draft was fix my grammar mistakes. I added commas where one of my sentences were too long and I added periods to divide a large sentence that did not make sense together and where a new one had to start. After my grammar check, I began to do more research to fill in the gaps of where more evidence was needed. Furthermore, when I was done adding more evidence to support my point, I started to analyze my evidence in depth to break it down in the simplest way possible, so that my reader could have a better understanding of what the evidence was saying. Something else I edited in my final draft was, I shifted sentences from other paragraph into another where it made much more sense. For example, I took a sentence at the end of my introduction and added it to my conclusion. All of this taught me the importance of revision and editing and the effects that it has on the final paper.

   Throughout this class I learned that it is important to do all of the readings the professor has assigned. Eventually these readings will come in handy when you are writing a paper. I also learned  the importance of  time managing when it comes to writing a paper. For example, I never took advantage of all the time the professor gave me to do a paper, I was using to do doing everything last minute and this was something that I believed showed in most of my papers. This showed in a way that I was making minor mistakes that would have not been made if my paper was not rushed. The aftermath of me not taking advantage of all this time I had to write my papers, caused me to get low grade. For the future to avoid me making the same mistakes, I will start my assignments the day it was due to have a head start. I will also take the time out of my day to review my papers with caution and thoroughly so I can be able to fix the right errors.

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