Portfolio Reflection

My portfolio exemplifies the progressively better understanding of informative writing that I formed throughout the year. With each essay and instruction that went along with it, my comprehension of how to compose and informative essay steadily improved. The essay portions of my portfolio show clearly the improvement of my informative essay writing as I believe the quality of the writing itself improved in each essay, which is also reflected in the increase in my grade with each paper. This shows that my understanding of how to write well and interpret other informative essays changed and improved as the year went on. In this essay I will explain how my strengths and weaknesses slowly changed by reflecting on a skill difference in each essay,

The first, and I believe the most prominent, improvement is my increased ability to elaborate on a single topic. I am now able to expand and go in to solid detail where as before I had trouble really describing my information as if the reader had no prior knowledge of the subject. Before the class my writing reflected my neglect of this concept as I always wrote as if the reader had a least a slight amount of prior knowledge which made my writing much more unclear and not as easy to understand. This is shown in my definition essay as I elaborated the description of a role in to an entire essay. An example of this skill that I learned would be when I used a quote such as “The position of the medic is to receive all the injuries and to evaluate the severity of the injuries and after evaluated to pass each injury if severe enough on to the surgeon,” at the beginning of a paragraph and used the entire rest of the paragraph to break down each step of this process. This is shown also in my analysis essay in basically the same format of presenting the article to be analyzed at the beginning of a paragraph and then using the remainder of the paragraph to go into more specific

As I was composing my second essay I began to realize that most of my previous skill of elaboration was made up of more complex and image provoking diction. When I looked back on other essays that I had done in high school and early college I realized that I had a wider vocabulary than I previously had thought, it just took this class for me to realize it. In my definition essay most of the vocabulary seemed to just be more basic medical terminology, where as in my analysis essay the vocabulary was more visible. In this essay I use phrases such as “crucial protocols intended for survival,” and “purely just an article about first aid techniques with no other superfluous information,” which I believe show a small snippet of the vocabulary I used. It is also shown in my Titanic essay where I was explaining the medical aspect by describing the “affected individual’s hypothalamus malfunctions.” Where as my vocabulary might be small to some, I believe I have developed a decently sized and diverse vocabulary, mainly through the research done in this