Writing/ Comprehension/ Grammar Content Portfolio


1. First Essay (that I could find) vs. the latest
The earliest essay that I could find that I wrote in college was in Dr. Green’s Intro to Fiction class my 2nd year at Eastern. I did running start in high school and have no access to those assignments, but even then they were science based so I hadn’t been able to stretch my writing muscles until finally getting into his classroom, and it was rough. Not only did I have loads of grammatical and spelling errors, but even organization and concepts that I wrote about made no sense. If it was an essay that a student had given me as an assignment, I wouldn’t  have graded it as nicely as Green did.Compared to now, as I’ve gone through 2 years of upper level English courses and have really refined my skills as a writer (I think). In the beginning, I had an average grade of 75 on my essays in any of my English classes, versus now it’s between 85 and 90. My latest essay was the most complicated for me to write. It had nothing to do with any of our reading materials for the quarter, but was just an idea that connected a multitude of texts that I had to get across to my reader by website design, not an actual essay. It still needed an argument and all the aspects of an essay without being an essay, which has been the toughest challenge but I know with all of the practice I’ve had over the past few years, that I can actually do it. That’s what I hope to give my students. To give them the tools needed to get a super crazy idea across eloquently and intelligently, and hopefully they can use it in the future as well. 

2. Grammar Rules

I hate extensive grammar. HATE it. My sophomore English teacher was terrible at teaching it and no one in our class ever got under her teaching methods. I still haven’t gotten a total hang of it, I still have trouble with it but am working on getting the weirder concepts down (prepositions, identifying participles etc.). While I will happily critique any and everyone’s essays and look for basic grammatical errors, I still have a long way to go in order to be able to teach such concepts.

3. “How to Teach Writing Well”
My Writing presentation text was really influential to me because of how much it based itself on how important it is to let students write what they want and have interest in. I never liked writing essays in high school and didn’t realize my potential as a writer until college and being able to choose my topic within a certain set of parameters. I want to be able to give my students the same tools that I was given in hopes of helping them see their potential. 

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