Massimo Fillichio
Final Portfolio Cover Letter
December 5th, 2016
Outcome 1:
Process Essay
As time progressed and I became more knowledgeable and developed better writing skills and vocabulary, my style of writing grew and changed. Over time, as I developed a better sense of my views and began connecting to ideas bigger than myself, I was able to improve my writing skills and express my thoughts in a clearer, more concise way. After forming a better understanding about the ways in which writing is a recursive process, I was able to be more comfortable with writing my thoughts in a semi-organized manner, and then making revisions at the end. I stated in the first essay that, “the issue about jumping right into it is that you sometimes do not know where you are going to end up.” This aspect of my writing is still a problem I face in my writing. Sometimes when I jump the gun a little bit, I have a harder time connecting my ideas to form one main argument to then later prove my point. However, becoming aware of this flaw while writing my essay helped me to try and fix it in the future.
An important aspect of the writing process that I understood after writing the first essay was how making revisions can make a big difference. Critiquing my work and making slight adjustments to my work made my paper more thorough and helped me to get rid of any small grammatical errors I once overlooked. When going over this essay with my professor, he explained to me the errors in my writing, and showed me exactly how they effected my explanation. He described my perspectives as “unique”, but lacked the aspect of “showing”, rather then just “telling”. This bettered my understanding on how to convey a point across to the reader that I lacked before. Understanding my mistakes and fixing them prepared me to write a better paper for the next assignment. Making these improvements helped me to grow as a writer, which was an aspect I enjoyed. As I take more English courses and continue my education here at UCF, I will in turn grow as a writer and developed a stronger outlook on the writing process.
Outcome 2:
Essay contest/Rhetorical Essay Analysis
After completing all my writing assignments for this semester, my writing process and focus when I write has changed. One of the things that I really benefited from as a writer was grasping a better understanding of rhetorical writing and its effect on literature. This helped me to write for a somewhat different audience other than my professor, which was an aspect of this paper I enjoyed. In addition, I think academic writing is a truly valuable aspect that can bring forward a lot of important information forward. In addition, writing towards the corporation who was grading my paper changed how I wanted my paper to sound. Knowing that I was writing to "impress" in a way encouraged me to take on a more professional style of writing in the sense that I did not want to make careless mistakes, using it almost as a “lie” to myself to do better. In the past, I would have accepted my mistakes, but when writing this paper, I really wanted to do everything I could to prevent that. When I was writing my paper, I pretended in the back of my mind that a group of people would be reading and grading it, so I gave it everything I had. Using a more formal way of writing was interesting and important for this essay. In my paper, I responded to the rhetorical aspect of the prompt when I asked “What exactly can we do to make this better?” and “Asking me to give recommendations is really great,
but when they are ignored and not resolved day-by-day due to people of power, is it really worth putting your heart in it?” By asking these rhetorical questions, I was able to direct my readers train of thought, while still using a formal tone. The peer reviewer described my diction as “crucial to the essay, yet bland”. This helped me learn how to find that perfect middle, and made me learn a lot about my perspectives verse others. I think that the rhetoric aspect of writing is important because it helps to engage my reader mentally and makes them think while they’re reading my paper. Talking about these issues is important as I stated in my paper. “Exigence is shown in this prompt, because urgency is the only way these things will get done. It demands to answer the many issues of distracted driving and what it actually leads to,” as I stated in my paper and starting going up with a sound argument, I truly believe that these issues need to be brought to governments and even the publics attention. Writing on something that I believed in definitely gave me a great grasp on how to be more effective.
The effects on writing choices primarily effects the audience and the flow of the paper. If I were writing for my college professor, I probably would have taken on a more academic style and tone of writing. I think that making myself believe in the back of my head that there was potential for an incentive made me want to outdo myself. In all, my rhetorical analysis allowed me to test my boundaries when its comes to writing. I was able to write under a different context and try something different. I enjoyed this paper because I felt that I could use good details and and challenge myself in a way that I never had to before.
Outcome 3:
Literacy Narrative Essay
Understanding text and being able to relate to the author and their perspective is a major aspect in writing that contributes to the overall success in the class. Failure to understand text and the point of view that the author is coming from is a main part of why students find content difficult to analyze and understand. If students find trouble understanding the text the first time they read it, it be hard for them to pull thoughts and ideas from the text and further analyze it. For example, if a college professor assigns a paper to write and bases it off a piece of literature like a poem, story, or article, it is crucial for the student to understand the text through and through. If the student as trouble understanding the literature, it would probably be near impossible for the student to right a paper analyzing the text and writing a paper reflecting on the material. In addition, after reading various texts and books throughout the semester and throughout my years of schooling it became much easier for me to find the main idea and overall idea of texts.
The skills and comprehension needed to read and understand these articles is a difficult task and has taken me years of schoolwork and practice to become comfortable and good at doing. Being able to understand arguments and concepts in college-level texts made it clear on how to write things like the Literary Narrative, and to show the reader my “compelling” argument. A peer reviewer believed that this was the main highlight of my essay, how I was able to so well “describe my literary life”, and give emotion to the reader. I discussed my first interactions with my teacher at Montessori school, and talked about how I then transformed my writing into a book, to now being where I am today. Having this essay to show my own story gave me the core values of how important it is to understand how to explain something with different perspectives and purposes. Overall, the development of my skills and being able to read and understand literature was really important to my success today. To describe where I am recently, I discussed how “my surroundings have brought me (and my own self-doing) into a state of little to no reading, but yet I still find myself the urge to read something that blows my mind.”
Outcome 4:
Ethnography Essay
In the final writing assignment, I was able to show a relationship between discourse conventions and genres and their related communities. Specifically, I researched the community of Sigma Chi, and its relationship with our brothers and the rest of the University of Central Florida’s community. Talking about how we formed a brotherhood in a group of guys that once didn’t know each other shows how a community can form from nothing. My paper suggested how positive the outcome of pledging was for myself and my pledge brothers. I talked about how the presence of the Alumni shows how much being in Sigma Chi means to all brothers. The role that the Alumni have with the surrounding community is helpful because they have people of all ages in it so at applies to a broader aged group of people. “They change the quality of whole environment, by always donated and trying to help out the students.” This explanatory and descriptive diction is something a peer review reflected on by saying “needs more description to give understanding, think about outside perspective”. This made me realize that being in something from the inside, although I showed the different ways it is perceived, to truly show the reader what I am trying to say I need to elaborate more on this. This critiquing only benefitted me, because I learned the value of good communication and Writing this opened my mind to the vast amount of different perspectives fraternity life and Sigma Chi itself has. While doing so I discussed the unique language of Sigma Chi, and how each fraternity has there own style. This made me work on my own style in a different way, and by doing show reflects on the strong bonds and great communication they have today. After constant revisions and a true learning process, my final draft reflects deeply on the great awareness and understanding of the community and a proper analysis needed for the reader to grasp.
