Yaire Castillo

2 December 2020 

ENG1121

Word count: 546

Part 1:

In the beginning of the semester I was the type of writer who was scared to speak their mind. I was scared that people who would read my writing would just disagree, making me feel bad for expressing my thoughts. Thankfully, no one did that. I started being more comfortable talking about things that others may disagree on. I grew tremendously as a scholar because in the beginning I was extremely unmotivated to do school work since all my classes were online. Little by little I started to get the hang of it and I became more responsible and organized. As a reader I believe that I’ve always been able to understand the author’s message and purpose of their writing. As a writer, I changed a lot. Now I am able to write about anything I want to because they are my thoughts and beliefs. There are many ways in which I will be able to use what I have learned this semester and transfer that knowledge to other writing situations, either in college or in my community. For example, for my other classes such as public speaking or my law classes I am able to write a well structured essay, be able to do MLA citations etc. I am so thankful for this english class. I was truly able to find strength and confidence in myself to write about topics that I have always been scared to talk about. I guess it is because I don’t like others disagreeing with me. But that’s what I learned in this class, that it is okay to write about the things that you want to talk about. You write and make sure to make yourself proud!

Part 2:

Two micro-activities that I want to include into my portfolio are Micro-activity #4 and #6. The reason as to why I’m choosing these two micro-activities is because it was a major roller coaster for me. In the Micro-activity #4 we focused on Frederick Douglas’ speech, “What to the Negro is the Fourth of July.” I’m not going to lie, when I first saw how many pages it was I genuinely wanted to just turn my laptop off and head to bed. But I knew that wasn’t the right thing to do, obviously. When it comes to writing I love when we get to read speeches, articles, stories or anything really and we choose quotes to emphasize a specific idea and then explain it. That’s why I loved Micro-activity #4, even though it was a lot of pages to read it was really worth it. When I read the speech I started to think about it as well, what does the fourth of july truly mean to me? Can I even celebrate it? Things of that sort started to roam around my brain. I chose Micro-activity #6 because it was one of the writing pieces I had trouble with. We had to read the Dedicatory Letter by Mary Wollstonecraft. For some reason, it was difficult for me to truly understand what she was saying. I had to read the letter more than twice to truly understand her letter. Even to this day I am not sure if I understood what she wanted to say but I think I did.