TraceFinalPortfolio

Trace Cummings Reflective Portfolio

Final Portfolio

Cover Letter:

**Free Writing #1**

Free writing is something I had never encountered before English 103. I had heard about it or read about it somewhere but had never tried it for myself. Believe it or not, I had a little trouble doing free writing exercises in the beginning. There is no correct way to free write except for the fact that the writer is not supposed to stop writing in order to get their thoughts onto the page, so it should be easy, right? Wrong. In order to free write, the writer must not edit their writing as they go, which I had some trouble with. However, once I got the hang of it, it was very helpful. In addition to being very therapeutic, free writing allows the writer to clear their mind and organize his or her thoughts. I wrote about my first couple of weeks as a college student and how I was handling the situation. For me, the biggest change about the transition from high school to college is the amount of people I came into contact with so I also chose to include a little bit of writing on how friendly or unfriendly the people I met were.

**Memoir Rough Draft: The Better Man**

Writing this memoir was one of the best things I have ever done as a writer. Not because it is a great piece of writing, but because it helped me get something off of my chest. I wrote about a fight that I had had with my best friend, Jeremy, when we were back in middle school. After punching Jeremy, I expected him to fight back like all of the other fights I had been in. However, Jeremy chose not to fight back and instead walked away. It took me a while to realize the significance of this situation but once I did, it changed my life for the better. This memoir was fairly easy for me to write since it was a true story but it was hard to select a topic to write about in the first place. I had many other events in mind that I wanted to write about, but when I tried to write them down I was met with poor results. This particular memory was fresh in my mind and it taught me a great lesson.


 * A Public Letter: The Name-Crime Link **[[file:The Name-Crime Link.rtf]]

Writing the public letter was the greatest challenge to me as a writer. I am not sure if it was the genre itself that was difficult or the subject I chose to write about. While most people were choosing to write about things like drunk driving or littering, I chose to write about something that was a little more... unusual. The day before we had to chose a topic I stumbled across an article that showed evidence that linked strange names with criminal behavior. I was intrigued by this idea but was unsure of how to write about it. African American's are notorious for giving their kids strange names but I did not just want to target African Americans specifically for a fear of sounding racist.


 * The Multigenre Project **[|http://www.summerwalkers.weebly.com]

This was a very interesting project indeed. At first I found the multigenre concept a little confusing. Some of the examples we read in class were a bit far fetched and it was sometimes difficult to tell what the writer was trying to say in the bigger picture. However, it turned out that writing this website was good practice at linking thoughts together using different genres of writing. Instead of concentrating on one specific piece of writing, we were forced to look at the bigger picture.