Ethan's Portfolio

During the second semester, I went to the writing center twice for my research project. I went once with Louise and once with Michael Lee. My focus with Louise was organizing my intros and outros to my paragraphs. In other words, she helped me improve upon my bland transitions. I used this meeting to further my research paper and, I believe that by using and creating these stronger transitions my paper became more mature and better as a whole. Louise also helped me with a creative side and bettered my word choice that was rather boring. My focus with Michael was mainly my organization in my paragraphs. His help was very important to me because my organization was pretty rough before Michael helped me. I took the advice he gave me and I believe that it is one of the reasons why I think my research paper was a hit. Both of these writing fellows helped me significantly and improved my research paper for the better. Their advice has stuck with me and, I will always look at my papers and th...

This year I feel that I was able to accomplish many things as a student and as a writer in English. I believe that I was able to grow as a writer and that I drastically improved from last year’s English performance. Last year I felt as if I was not a mature writer and still had bad habits and tendencies when it comes to English. One of my goals moving onto high school was to drop these tendencies and habits because I knew it was for the better. I have learned to have confidence in myself as a writer. Coming into high school after a rough eighth-grade year, I had little to no confidence in myself as a writer. By writing every week, I have slowly gained my confidence as a writer back. I have learned that I am a stronger writer than I perceive myself to be. I have learned that when I have confidence in myself as a writer, I create better pieces of writing. All in All, I feel that this year I was able to significantly improve as a writer and have gained back the confidence needed to write...

I believe that one of my strengths as a writer is reading text and being able to generally understand the basic ideas, themes, and significance of the piece of writing. In my research paper about The Silk Road, I felt that I was able to read the numerous articles and gain the significant facts and ideas from these articles and put them into my notecards and my outline. Being able to do this was crucial to the research paper because it is the entire research part. I feel that another one of my strengths as a writer is being able to connect with the reader. I believe that my narrative at the beginning of the year about a family member's funeral best exemplified this. I believe that I successfully placed the reader in my shoes and made them feel the pain I had felt in those moments. I think that I was successfully able to portray the event in a way that I have never been able to before. Part of this is due to details that I included in my narrative. Finally, I believe that I have grow...

My goals for the upcoming sophomore year in high school will be to understand writing fluency a little better, to be able to use punctuation the best of my ability, improve upon my organization, and be able to write an essay paper. Some ways that I can improve are using. Writing strategies, using IXL, and creating better outlines to further my understanding my English skills. I feel that this is attainable because I am a hard-working student, and I believe that by putting in extra work I will be able to further understand these areas that need improvement. I think that a way to improve upon my organization and fluency in writing is to stay focused on what I am writing about, and not stay away from any off topic or things that do not relate to the subject. I feel that by using writing strategies, I will my fluency as a writer will increase due to that. By using writing strategies, you get more of a feel for what you are writing before you write. I often use talking before writing to j...