Welcome to my English 131 portfolio! My name is Mitchell Franklin and I have decided to bring a little bit of sun and warm water into this portfolio because it is something I haven't seen much of in Seattle. I am a California citizen that decided to make the trek up to the best university in the world for college, the University of Washington! I am still currently undecided in my major but I am hoping to get into the Foster School of Business. I like to relate a lot of things to surfing because I think it can teach you so many life lessons. For example, I can think of this class a little bit like learning to surf. When I was little, I always thought surfing was cool and looked super fun, but it wasn't until years later that I went surfing one time and it changed everything. I had been surfing plenty of times before and it never clicked and I was horrible. Until one day when I was about 12, I caught a ton of waves and gained a new perspective. That is sort of how I think about this class. Throughout high school, English never clicked and I didn't enjoy it at all. This quarter was sort of like my special day of surfing. All it took was a little bit of freedom in my writing for me to realize that I actually really enjoy it, and in fact, you gave us enough freedom that I was able to write about things I actually cared about like surfing and Fortnite. This class has changed it all.

I happen to like stories with happy endings. I think everyone does. Even if I get confused a little bit along the way, if it all ties together at the end, then that's a happy ending. While there were quite a few parts of this course that left me struggling, I overcame those obstacles. After going over the course outcomes in the first week of class, I was a little bit intimidated. But after taking it piece by piece, and word by word I finally got there and got that happy ending I was looking for. It wasn’t until I looked back at the course outcomes we were shown at the beginning of the quarter that I realized how much I actually learned. Throughout high school, we are taught to follow a strict rubric that doesn’t allow any room for creativity. I come from a pretty good school district but starting freshman year of high school, all we are taught is to write a five paragraph essay with an introduction paragraph, three body paragraphs and a conclusion. On top of that, you need three quotes per paragraph and an explanation for all of those. Nothing changed in the style of writing year by year, the analysis just got graded harder. I thought I didn’t even like English but I realized it was just the way it was being taught. Teaching through outcomes as goals leaves us students with much more room for creativity. Within the first quarter of being in college, the prompts and freedom really allow for the student to expand their writing into ranges they have never reached before.

This portfolio that has been put together includes a variety of topics and writing styles, exactly what I wanted. The purpose of my portfolio is to demonstrate my progression in my writing from the beginning of the quarter until the very end. We were given four goals/outcomes of what we were supposed to master by the end of the quarter, and I think I showed that in this portfolio. The first of four goals for this class was to learn to communicate with a variety of audiences using different techniques that were suited for the situation. This portfolio does just that. I have included essays about topics ranging from the videogame “Fortnite”, to a more serious essay about why Rosa Parks is truly so important. Clearly, these two essays are for two very different audiences and can be written from completely different perspectives. With the freedom of choice in Short Assignment 2, I was able to use rhetorical elements in a piece of work that already existed(Fortnite) and critically analyze what didn’t work. Finding the bad in something that you really enjoy can be quite a difficult challenge but I think this was truly my first step towards really being able to analyze what I say in my essays. This is the type of essay where you really have to think about what you are saying because it is hard to criticize something you really enjoy. The second of the four goals of this course was to be able to read and analyze information that comes in all shapes and sizes and use that to sort of create a conversation with the text and develop questions that push your writing to the next level. This was using intertextuality to tie all sorts of sources together because that is something I had never done before but is a really useful tool. You can see this develop in Short Assignment 3 where we were to use intertextuality to analyze the films and texts. In this instance, I used the “10 Point Program'' from the Black Panthers and tied it to the theme/significance of the movie, “Straight out of Compton”. The third of the four goals for this class was to make complex arguments that were driven by in depth analysis of texts and understanding the consequences of different arguments for different audiences. For me, this was when I sort of had to shave down the part of my essay that was about the looting in Walnut Creek, because I was putting too much opinion in it, rather than sticking to the main point of the essay and thinking why they maybe chose to loot as opposed to do a peaceful protest in that specific situation. Another time where I really focused on outcome three was in Short Assignment 1 where we had to consider the consequences of the writing, and figure out how genre and audience affect organization and structure. For this, I actually wrote about surfing and that clearly has a very narrow audience, because not everyone lives near the beach so from that, I was able to adjust my writing. The final goal of this course was to focus on revision. I unfortunately got very sick and was unable to go through the same revision process as everyone else, but I did get to have a one on one meeting with you which was extremely helpful for me to realize I needed to work on analyzing rather than just summarizing. I unfortunately was not able to give any constructive criticism to anyone but I know that sometimes when you help revise another person's paper, it can give light to your own paper from a different perspective. 

This portfolio shows how I developed my writing over the course of the quarter because to be quite honest, all of my first submissions were choppy and didn’t really flow. For my major project, my first draft was as if my essay were split in half into two completely different essays and the challenge for me was to figure out how to incorporate the second half of my essay throughout the first half to make it flow much better. There is a time and place for opinion within an essay. Towards the beginning of the quarter, nearly all my essays were opinion. As we worked our way towards a little bit more tricky prompts that required more evidence, I found myself internally panicking because I wouldn’t know what to write. But as I practiced, instead of just summarizing once more, I was able to slowly find myself being able to truly analyze and draw new conclusions so thank you, and enjoy. Buckle in.