Throughout my college career I have strived to become a better reader, writer, editor, and all around student. This is not an easy feat to do but every year I work harder and harder to reach my goals and brighten my future. My dream is to become a teacher but I will never cease to keep learning with every new day I am given. Through my advanced composition class, I have learned different ways of writing such as analysis, research, creative nonfiction, narrative, formal e-mail, web, and self-reflection. These academic writing samples, that are shown in my portfolio, will show you a little bit about what I learned and the work I submitted in this class during my junior year.

In the last few months, I have learned many new ways to read and write. This might sound strange because we learn how to read and write in Elementary School, but college has opened my eyes to different ways of thinking and learning. In my advanced composition class, instead of using a textbook, we used a literature book called “The Sense of Style” by Steven Pinker. This book has showed me different styles of writing and what to look for when peer reviewing or reading other pieces of writing.

One thing that really stood out to me, that I will continue to keep using throughout my teaching career is peer review. I used peer review in many of my classes but not quite like we did in this English class. For our very last assignment, Professor Weddington had us get in groups of four and read each person’s creative nonfiction essay while editing and writing about your thoughts. After giving us a week to do so, we then had to do a workshop together and talk about each person’s paper in front of them so they could get insight as to what they should work on and what they did properly. This was extremely helpful for me because often times I feel like it would be helpful to have a new set of eyes read over my paper after I’ve worked on it for a long time. I can use this in my classroom to help kids understand their own writing by helping others with their writing. I’ve learned that if you can teach someone something that you know, in turn it will also help you know it better.