As far as my health goes, this quarter did not go how I wanted it to. On the bright side, as far as my writing skills go, this quarter went exactly how I wanted it to. I have never considered myself a strong writer or someone who enjoys English very much but I have learned that the only reason I thought that way was because of how I have been taught in the past. In the past, everything has been strict and allowed for no freedom or creativity. But now that I have those things, I have a whole new outlook on English. I never in a million years would have expected to like english so much. I have always thought I would just try to major in finance and go from there. But now, I am completely reconsidering what I want to do. I realized that I don't actually like math as much as I thought I did, I was just better at it than I was at English. Now I have taken a class with freedom of writing  want to have a major that involves the same thing. 

It is important that I have mastered the course outcomes not only to receive a grade, but to take into my future of writing. It doesn't matter what the piece of writing I am working on looks like, in the future, depending on the circumstance, I am going to be able to apply one if not more than one of the outcomes to it. Learning how to adjust your writing depending on your audience was definitely the most interesting in my opinion because I can see it being used in every single piece of writing ever. Whenever a person writes anything, they have an intended audience in their head. Nobody writes a story or an essay or article thinking that no one will ever see it. There is no point of that. Every time you write, you think about the audience whether you know it or not. Not adjust the way you write, your tone, the topic, everything. Writing the final reflection for my very first english portfolio is going to look a lot different and have a different mood to it than me asking.

Outcome number two is very important to master because I am not always going to be fed what sources to use. It is on my to be able to find credible sources that I can then analyze and evaluate. This extremely important because to be able to have a high level of writing, you have to be able not only analyze instead of summarize, but you have to be able to analyze anything. You have to be able to draw conclusions and give new information because without it, the reader is not learning anything new. Outcome three is also important because in most pieces of writing, you are trying to prove something. Whether it is something significant or not doesn't matter. Learning what techniques work to be persuasive and which ones don't can be applied to almost all writing and can be used all the throughout the future. Lastly, the process of revision is something that shouldn't be taken lightly. Nobody publishes a book after the first draft. It takes time and attention to the smallest details to write a good piece.

The skills I have developed will most certainly help me in my future classes. In fact, some of them will help me in classes that have nothing to do with writing. After going through the revision process, I noticed that I do not pay very close attention to detail and that is something I am going to take into all my classes because when you don't pay attention to the little things, you miss the big picture. This will help me understand things like history a lot better because I would really try to comprehend the small stuff and then the big picture wouldn't make sense. 

Like I said earlier, this class has actually changed my perspective on what I want to major in. I had always wanted to major in something that involved math because that was what I was good at. But now that I know there are types of writing and english with freedom that I actually like, I have already broadened my horizon and thought about what else I could major in. No matter what my major in, the I will be able apply at least some of the course outcomes at any given time.

The work I have done this quarter will definitely apply to things outside of this class and school. This is because my major may switch, and if I don't major in something that involves math, then this course would have single handedly switched the outcome of what I would want to do in my career. 

To be quite honest, I don't know what my strengths were coming into this class because I have never had a teacher tell me what they liked about my essay then tell me what they didn't like. Even if I did well, the only feedback I have ever gotten was what I could do better. But this class was different. Getting the positive feedback then getting the constructive criticism really motivated me to want to fix the wrong and I really appreciate that from you.

You have done a lot more for me than you probably think just from being generous about me being sick and answering all of my emails and just being super clear with everything you do. I am going to take that with me into the future so thank you for a great quarter!