Welcome to my English 131 portfolio for Spring 2013. Inside this portfolio, I will demonstrate how I made effort to improve my writing skill and fulfill all writing outcomes, what I gained from English 131, what significance this course has, and how much I have changed during this course by analyzing all the works I have done in this class. 

English 131 is a composition class, which requires a lot of works on writing papers. As an ESL student who actually speaks English as the third language (I also speak Cantonese and Mandarin), I had been afraid of writing in English for a long time, because not only did I not like writing down all the thoughts in my mind in strict form, but also I couldn’t use English to express my thoughts as fluently and freely as I do that in Cantonese or Mandarin. I registered for English 131 because of distribution requirements, and I hadn’t expected this class could change my attitude to writing. However, there are many things happened out of my expectation. This course is logically organized. We first learned how to compose our own writings by analyzing other writers’ articles, and then we learned how to generate our claims, how to revise our papers, and how to explore our own writing topics. The curriculum arrangement is reasonable, which has strongly improved my ability of writing. Our class is specialized for ESL students, so we also have opportunity to concentrate on problems that only ESL students have, such as lower order concerns and grammar errors. Because of being offered many opportunities to improve my English writing skills by the English 131 class, I have gained much confidence of writing in English and I have been continuously increasing my willingness to write English papers.

Computer science is the subject that I want to choose as my major. In the progress of learning how to write essays, I have found writing is more or less like coding (writing programs). There are four outcomes we should fulfill after taking English 131; each of the outcomes can be analogized to a coding concept when we do programming. Outcome 1 refers to the ability to use different strategies for different contexts or different audiences, which is similar to the ability to choose different coding styles for different pieces of programming code; outcome 2 refers to the ability to use others’ texts and evidences to support our writing claims, which is similar to the ability to reuse already-written pieces of code or libraries; outcome 3 refers to the ability to produce and unpack complex claims, which is similar to the ability to the ability to choose different algorithms to solve problems; outcome 4 refers to the ability to revise articles and make them strong enough for presentations, which is similar to the ability to debug. In this class, I have practiced a lot to fulfill all of these outcomes, and I now able to write persuasive essays that strongly fulfill all of these outcomes.

When writing essays for English 131, I have created some impressive “masterpieces”. One outstanding example is the second draft of my major paper 2. This paper has received a high evaluation from our teacher Tesla, and it is also chosen as an example to demonstrate how to analyze and unpack evidence in the class. There are also three other good articles that show my ability to produce good writings. All of these four articles – Short Assignment 1&2, Major Paper 1&2, are chosen as my “Big Four” to demonstrate how I can compose good writings and how I fulfill all the outcomes I mentioned above.

The following pages will demonstrate how I satisfy the course expectation and what achievements I gained from this course. Please exam my ability to compose good writings by continuing to read this portfolio according to your taste.

Have fun :-)

Ps. the file names of the articles that are revised as “Big Four” are labeled with a suffix “_REV”. For example, the major paper 1 revised as “Big Four” is named “MP1_REV”. The file names without this suffix stand for the ones inside the compendium of works without being revised as “Big Four”.