My Personal Narrative

This portfolio fits with a more broad and overarching theme in my life of reorganization and the reevaluation of personal priorities. This type of deep personal reflection has a way of manifesting itself in subversive ways throughout my life, one of which, being my writing. This critical thinking approach helped me revise and and shape each of these essays in a way that I am proud of, and more importantly, offered me a forum in which I could discuss some of the most personally effecting aspects of my life as I have transitioned to college.

Personal Narrative: My personal narrative served as a means to talk about and cope with a major life hardship, and although a cliché idea overall, I believed that the reason behind this breakup offered

This however, was not at all how the resulting first draft came out. Confusing, pointless, and disappointing, are words that both I and my kind roommate who proofread for me, used to describe it. Armed with this understanding, my second draft focused on shifting the story to something a reader would be entertained by, and that might answer the question of why is this important. Although vastly improved from my first draft, both grammatically and structurally, I still had not delved into a way to fully answer the question of why. Much of this still stems from my own personal lack of distance to the event at hand, and is unresolvable. However, with draft three, I have worked solely with the purpose of reshaping the essay to answer the why question, so that the reader will come away from reading it feeling satisfied. The most influential feedback I received, was after making poor Justin Fortini read and reread my drafts, trying to make sense of it all in the large scope of laying out the stories, and selecting which to include and which to cut. As draft three was completed, I looked and

As I became more at ease with the school and aspects not related to academics, these personal growths reflected deeply in my academic abilities, specifically in my writing, as I produced bad, alright, then pretty good papers for Expository Writing 101 with Professor Sousa. More specifically speaking, my ability to recognize a confusing structure emerging in my essay has greatly improved, as has my attention to detail that piles up and affects the greater quality of the paper. These details are small, like topic sentences, run-on sentences, and other little contributing factors that give writing a polished feel. However, I still very much need to work on recognizing and answering the why question in my personal narratives. Looking back, I would describe myself as having transitioned from being affectable in September to introspective by