Portfolio Guide

It appears to me that the portfolio guide and the comity put a lot of time and effort into making this English program. Every step and process of the way what needs to be done in the class, what we need to keep to prove that we have have grown as writers, the three essays we need to turn into the comity, and the cover letter. Each of these things are the keys to passing english 100/100a/200. First is the working portfolio, this will contain all of the drafts,revision, and reader’s responses all through the semester. This is something excellent to show the comity because this can be a supporting document showing the growth you have made along the way. The second portfolio includes the cover letter and two to four writings. The cover letter is where you can shine, this is your chance to actually write to the comity for a little bit about each of the writings you turn in. You want to explain all of your strengths and weakness, thats right your weakness, if you demonstrate awareness of what you learned as a writer then it shows you understand. If a student has a D+ or lower then they cannot submit any of the portfolios and must take english 200 in order to try again. I truly enjoy this portfolio system, it dose not make you feel like you are being judge by the work you put out. The teachers and students both act as coaches and editors to each other. It is important to us as writers in the class to get feed back from on another so that we may look at our own writings in different lights so that we may add, or edit things we did not see before. When turning in your final work to the portfolio comity make sure it meets all of the requirements such as heading, fonts, and the placement for your all your information. After reading the portfolio guide I feel confident in the portfolio comity expectations for the level of writing from all of the university, they came up with a system that works to help teach not only the students but the teachers and ways they can help teach us better.

General Apache/Simplicity

“Writing about General Apache”
I had found the story about Dr.Harrington luring to me. As soon as I started to read about his student who survive the war in Vietnam and took a bullet that is next to his spine, I immediately wanted to jump to the back to read Dr.Harrington’s poem for his student. The idea for having the student chose there own topics for papers is excellent and is not suppressing that the quality from the students is better. It is terrible to think what people did to Vietnam veterans, the solders who went over there not all of them had a choice and when they all came back people treated them poorly spiting in there faces calling them baby killers, most getting lost in alcohol and drugs to deal with coming back to the real world without there friends they fought with to survive for there lives every night. The poem gave something back to him, it gave him piece of mind, a way for him to allow people how he felt and what he went through.
“Simplicity”
I understand the concept of repetition not being needed, sloppy sentences, run ons and so on, but I don’t find clutter to be meaningless jargon. Sometime things need to be explained or concrete details need to be given to the reader. To have a simple paper is cant have words serving no functions, every long word needs to be replaced with short ones, and cant have adverbs with same meaning already in the verb. I extremely enjoy reading about Henry david Thoreau and Walden, the reason why they are so clutter free and clear is because there messages are so simple, they want you to think, learn, live, and question. The key to writing in the uncultured way is to have a clear mind and know what you want to, having an intreats and passion for what you write makes this easy because it clicks. I do not find the attention span of a reader to be 30 seconds, in the average day the average college student dose way more. The reason why some readers have short attention spans is because all throughout the day they are attacked by billboards and signs, magazines,TV, and internet by the end of the day it is no shock that the average person dose not want to read an article that is not interesting in the first place.