If I remember correctly, you encouraged us to take some creative risk when composing this portfolio. Normally, I like to stay on the safe side and keep my academic work pretty cut and dry, but I recently was inspired by the musical episode of Buffy, so please excuse me as I reflect once more on my writing except this time with feeling. I’ll be honest that I expected that doing this portfolio at the end of the quarter after all the other coursework and finals (and in my lucky case surgery), I’d be a little burned out and doing this portfolio would just feel like going through the motions. However, while I am in fact very burned out, I realized that this portfolio was actually not as tedious of a task as I made it out to be in my mind. What it came down to was basically explaining what I got out of the course and what I learned from this quarter. Since I really do believe that I grasped the outcomes of this course, it was surprisingly not that hard to write about how I grasped these outcomes. I have a theory (which I should note excludes bunnies) that the key to being a successful writer comes from lots of practice and then engaging with the work to see what worked and what didn’t through meta-perspective. With a writing assignment due every week and geared towards the four outcomes, it comes to no surprise to me that I began to get a better understanding of these outcomes. I hope that after you’ve examined my portfolio, you will be under the spell of my mastery of the outcomes and see the strides that I have made this quarter. I’ve walked through the fire that is English 131, and I feel like I’ve appeared on the other side as a writer that is more proficient in context and audience- awareness, in using texts to support an argument, in building an argument, and in successfully revising a paper. Thank you for a great quarter and for introducing me to Buffy.

Sincerely,

Chanelle