Portfolio Assessment and Revision Plan - Essay Example

Title One of the primary goals for taking any English class is obviously to constantly be evolving and improving one’s writing. Every time I write I try to reflect on my writing of the past and improve what I have done, make my technique more readable, engaging and so forth. Across my first three assignments, I believe I have made a series of notable improvements, but two stand out. I believe that my writing became much better organized, with better use of main points and supporting evidence, and also became much more direct, with less vagueness and flowery language.

One of the most immediate changes I see to my writing is an improvement in organization. In my first essay, there was not necessarily a logical flow from one point to another. I essentially used two disconnected paragraphs that both spoke about the article in question, without actually combining together to form a cohesive argument. This can be seen very clearly by the topic sentence of my second paragraph, where I stated that “Also tackled in this article is the use of “Framing theory” as a guide in differentiating the media practices in China.

” While this did describe a thing the article did, it did not actually connect that well with what I had done in my previous paragraphs. In my later essays, however, I paid much more attention to organization. I believe that one of the things that was most helpful to me was segmenting my essay into various sections, such as a “literature review”, “comparison between languages and so forth”. I did this in each of my two later essays. This forced me to structure my essay in a more cohesive way, with each particular subject having a clear relationship to the thesis or main point I was trying to make, and kept each part of the paragraph clearly related to a specific aspect of that argument.

I believe I will not have to use these types of headings as much in the future, but they were still certainly useful in keeping me on track in terms of organization. I believe the second major change that I made in my writing is the development of a simpler, clearer style. My first essay had some relatively vague language in it, especially in the introduction. The opening of my first essay, which stated that “with great power, comes great responsibility” worked well as a hook, but did not tell the reader anything about what I would be writing about.

In my subsequent essays I became much more direct, launching immediately into my topic of discussion, and keeping my sentences short, precise, and to the point. For example, the opening line of my second essay was “Globalization has great increased the need for learning a second language due to expansion in the communication between different communities” – this hooks the reader in, while also telling them exactly what the topic of my essay will be. In revising my third essay I want to keep these things in mind, because I believe that it is always possible to become more concise, and that being very concise leads to more precision in writing.

For example, I believe that I could tighten up the language some in some of my paragraphs. I also believe the second paragraph of my essay, under “arguments” could be divided into several smaller paragraphs each focusing on one topic in order to keep my essay more focused. I think that my writing has developed significantly over the course of my first three assignments, but am also aware of how incredibly easy it would be to slip back into bad habits. Clear, concise, precise writing that is well structured takes a lot of time and effort to produce compared to vague and flowery writing, but it is also much more effective at communicating.

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