Portfolio, Essay Example

In this final portfolio paper, I have selected three essays I have learned from the most in the last term. I feel like I have managed to improve my writing, the focus and structure of the essay as well as the sentences. Selecting the below essays has also got another reason, and this is to focus on personal and persuasive writing skills in general.

The Psychology of Writing

In this essay I have written about the attitudes and personal experiences about writing narratives and essays. It is evident that I have sometimes complicated sentences too much, making them extremely long. Using unnecessary or redundant expressions was the most common mistake I made. The flow of the paragraphs and building connections between different parts of the texts was a challenge. In this essay I have made changes to get the text and logics balanced in the writing and focused on one aspect of hobbies, motivation and what I am most passionate about: music. In this review of writing I stated that re-reading the essays did indeed help me build a natural logical flow to the work and I often moved sentences and parts of sentences around to make the text more appealing, logical and professional. I realized that proof-reading after a few days was indeed helpful when revising the whole document. Distancing myself from the emotions involved in writing about my passion and re-reading the text as if I was an outsider had proved itself to be a good method to eliminate most of the mistakes I made previously.

Reasons for Volunteering

In this essay, during the revision process I have learned a lot about starting of sentences. I finally understood that the sentence starting needs to be interesting, short and straightforward. For example, instead of using “many people cannot comprehend” I used “not many people can comprehend” which makes the sentence more straightforward and eliminates double denial. I, again,, struggled with redundant expressions, and the logical flow of the essay. By rewriting the last paragraph, I was finally able to create a conclusion for the essay, summarizing my thoughts. In order to create a logically flowing essay, there is a need for an introduction, expansion and conclusion. Even though I did not clearly separate the parts of the essay and made the conclusion a part of the last larger paragraph, the flow of thoughts appears more logical and there is a close connection between sentences and paragraphs. This, however, does not meant that all of this was accomplished at once, and I will certainly have to working on building the essay up logically from the beginning, instead of adding connections after a couple of proof-reads.

I have struggled with the structure of sentences in this essay alike, and this meant that I had to go back and re-read them again several times to identify what the problems were. In most cases, the meaning of the expression was not completely clear, or other times the sentence appeared too long and complicated to follow through for the average person. Making a sentence simpler; either by breaking it down to more than one sentences or simplifying the expressions, phrases adds value to the essay and makes the job of the reader easier.

Rhetorical Canons

During this assignment I had to create a persuasive essay adding a logical flow and strong conclusion. Although I made notes initially in order to create the essay and used the bullet point method it was very hard to build up the paragraphs in a way that they would be connected with each other logically. I created multiple paragraphs mixing the examples with persuasion and after re-reading the essay I realized that this approach did not work at all. I had to move some sentences in order to create an introduction and conclusion paragraph separately. When trying to explain the five types of rhetorical canons I found it hard to make the long sentence easy to follow. I decided to use explanations in brackets and separate the different canons with comma.

After proof-reading the essay I realized that I had to break it down to multiple paragraphs as some of the content in the same part did not relate to the previous sentence. This is how I created a paragraph separately about the five types of rhetorical canons, the meaning of “rhetoric” and another one for examples of using these methods today. I also covered persuasion and speech, before I moved to the final conclusive paragraph that related back to the previous essay to summarize why I found knowing and studying rhetorical cannons important.

During this semester, I believe that I have improved my writing by reducing the use of redundant expressions, building more logical essays, paragraphs and sentences, however, the work is not done and I need to continue to make improvements to achieve excellence in writing.