Week 1 Self-Assessment (ePortfolio Prewriting #1)

This was our very first ePortfolio prewriting! It feels like ages ago that we wrote this. I feel like it's evident from my tone I was a lot more confident going into this course, and now that I've actually experienced 39C, I genuinely feel like a different person than I was when I first wrote this assessment. I have grown so much as a writer during this course and it's very fascinating to see what kind of headspace I was in when I first began class. Image captions were added later (12/8/2021).

I often like to pride myself on my writing abilities, touting the fact that it's "my strong suit," but in reality, I am constantly finding new areas to grow and improve. We are our own biggest critics, and as somebody who's a bit of a perfectionist, I always find myself nitpicking my writing, wondering in hindsight "why would I word that sentence that way?" or "how could I have possibly missed that?". It's definitely a bit of a double-edged sword: you want that self-awareness to keep you on your toes, but you also don't want it to push you too far to the point of throwing away draft after draft.

My past experiences in writing as a first-year that have shaped me the most would probably be my time in AP Lit, AP Lang, and even various freewriting activities in my 7th grade English class. I have always been a writer: I've known it practically since I came out of the womb, putting pen to paper as though it were going out of style. As a result, I am often hard on myself for making minor mistakes on a piece of writing, finding it hard to discern between what can be considered a "stylistic choice" and what's considered an outright error. With that being said, a few of the things I've learned and applied to my writing are as follows:

1. Write with purpose. Skip the eloquence when it's not needed: your own purple prose can leave you wondering what you just wrote.
2. Take the time to really understand your text. If an area is more challenging than another, slow down and break it down in a way that is most comprehensible to you.
3. Know what you're looking for before you begin to read. Are you composing an argument? Are you synthesizing your information?
4. If you say something, make sure it's supported. An essay without substance is practically no essay at all: it's essential to build credibility (ethos, pathos, logos!) as a writer.
5. In the case that your initial approach to a piece isn't working, it's okay to take a breath and try a different take.

By no means are these the only strategies I use and/or plan to use, but they are ones that come to mind. With 39C being my first and last class in the WR39 series, I know that there is so much I have yet to learn and so much knowledge I have yet to apply to my future assignments. I hope to use the lessons I have learned in the past in this class to make my essays as deliberate and thorough as possible.

Fig. 1. Preview excerpt of one of the pieces on my AP Lit Blog assignment, completed during my senior year of high school (2020-2021).

Fig. 2. Picture of a "mind map" used to brainstorm for an essay on The Scarlet Letter, also created during my senior year (2020-2021).