Introduction
As an eighteen years old student, writer, reader, researcher, and thinker in my first semester of college I feel like I have grown a lot since the first day I came here. Before I came here I had to take the writing placement test because my scores in the SAT and ACT exams were not high enough. When I first took my placement exam I was very confidence with my writing and I thought I did good cause I followed all of the writing rules that I have learned in high school. However, after two months I checked my UC Merced portal and I found out that I did not pass the test and that I’m required to take the Academic Writing 001 class in my first semester. As a result those scores brought my self-confidence level down and made me dreadfully scared of college writing and grading. In addition to all of that before I came here in high school I was always confused and insecure about writing because English is not my first language; therefore, I always had that feeling that I’m behind every body else in the class. Yet, all of that fear changed into confidence when I came to Mr. Moberly's Academic writing 001 class. Mr. Moberly's enthusiasm and technique of teaching changed my point of view of the false myths of writing that I have been taught in high school.
During this short period of time I earned knowledge in writing skills that will stay with me forever. Throughout this semester we had to write two essays one of them is a literacy narrative about a personal experience and the other one is a research paper about our opinion of Proposition 37. In order for us to write those two essays we had to do a lot of reading and analyze different texts such as articles and essays that we had read in the Language Awareness text book and online; also, we had to summarize it by doing a lot of work and activities such as reading response, source annotations, and the group grammar presentation. Along the way I faced some challenges in the writing format like the in text citation because it was different from what I learned in high school, but I was able to overcome that problem with Mr. Moberly’s help and the peer’s reviews. To make sure that we have the best writing, we had to do a lot of peer’s reviews to get others opinions on our papers and to receive different feed-backs in order for us to improve our writing.
My main goal from writing this portfolio is to show people how much I learned this semester and show the process of my writing improvement and how much knowledge and skills I have accomplished from writing those two essays. Now after all of what I have learned this semester I realized that this class is really important in order for us freshmen students to move on to higher level classes like Writing 10 and Core. I’m pretty sure that I will use what I learned here in not only future writing classes but also in future science and psychology labs reports due to my major.
During this short period of time I earned knowledge in writing skills that will stay with me forever. Throughout this semester we had to write two essays one of them is a literacy narrative about a personal experience and the other one is a research paper about our opinion of Proposition 37. In order for us to write those two essays we had to do a lot of reading and analyze different texts such as articles and essays that we had read in the Language Awareness text book and online; also, we had to summarize it by doing a lot of work and activities such as reading response, source annotations, and the group grammar presentation. Along the way I faced some challenges in the writing format like the in text citation because it was different from what I learned in high school, but I was able to overcome that problem with Mr. Moberly’s help and the peer’s reviews. To make sure that we have the best writing, we had to do a lot of peer’s reviews to get others opinions on our papers and to receive different feed-backs in order for us to improve our writing.
My main goal from writing this portfolio is to show people how much I learned this semester and show the process of my writing improvement and how much knowledge and skills I have accomplished from writing those two essays. Now after all of what I have learned this semester I realized that this class is really important in order for us freshmen students to move on to higher level classes like Writing 10 and Core. I’m pretty sure that I will use what I learned here in not only future writing classes but also in future science and psychology labs reports due to my major.