Tyler+B.

Tyler Bell ﻿  Final Portfolio

Cover Letter

Open Letter - Concussions in High School Sports

I feel that my open letter that I wrote about concussions in high school sports came out a lot better than I originally expected it to. Because I switched topics very soon before the due date for the paper, I was concerned about the overall quality. In the end I feel that it came out exactly how I wanted it to, with the perfect balance of facts and persuasive arguments so that people would feel the same way I did on the issue. This was my first experience writing a major paper in an open letter format, so it helped add another style of writing to the styles that I am used to applying in my papers.

Multi-Genre Essay - Family

The multi-genre essay was the paper that gave me the most challenges in this course. For this paper I had to go out of my comfort zone of writing in one form, and one form only in a paper. Having poetry as one of my weakest spots in writing, I was worried about how the whole thing would turn out in the end. The part that I had the most problem with was trying to maintain the same tone and message as I jumped from style to style in the writing. I feel that the examples of turning paragraphs into short poems helped me out greatly when it came to writing the poetry that was in my essay. Although it was the most challenging of the papers, I feel that it was my favorite. Despite it being a hard subject to talk about even to this day, I feel that it helped me out in accepting even more, all that has happened to my family.

Research Paper - Racial Profiling

In all of the papers and assignments that we had over the course of the semester, this was probably my least favorite. I usually like to keep my writing from being too "stuffy" as I like to say. I was not satisfied with the end of this paper at all. I think my main problem with this paper was the fact that at the time of the assignment, I was writing a research paper for my Psychology class at the same time. The subject matter of that paper was more exciting, and the paper itself was worth more points so I feel that I focused more of my attention and energy to that instead. I think that for this essay I wasn't prepared like I normally am and so that greatly effected the outcome of the paper itself. My writing at times became very confusing and vague. Instead of also adding my opinion to the paper it turned out to be nothing but straight facts delivered in a very boring manner.

Memoir - Snow Day

I loved writing the memoir for this course. This was my second favorite writing, behind the multi-genre essay. I felt that this was a perfect way to start the course and the first major writing assignment by having us write about a very important or fond memory from our past. I had the best time writing this paper because while writing it, I could actually see all of the events replaying in my head over and over again. Over all I feel that my writing in this was perfect except I feel like I could've added more details in certain places. Other than that, I was very pleased with the outcome of this paper.

Psychology Paper

This paper that I added was one of my research papers from my Psychology 100 course. I added this to show the variation of all of the writing that I have done over this last semester here at Ball State. Even though this is a type of a research paper, I feel that it better represents what I can do in a research paper than what I ended up with for the essay about Racial Profiling. Although the tone of this paper is very professional and almost "stuffy", I feel that it is an example of one of my best pieces of writing that I have ever created up until this point in time.