Peyton's Portfolio

                My strengths as a writer includes brainstorming and imagination, quoting and paraphrasing, and telling stories. When it comes to brainstorming, I need to work on it, but I am getting the hang of it. I can feel myself improving at assignments that we have done to prepare for writing. I feel that I always have ideas to write about because of my striving imagination. For example, when writing my personal narrative, I had so many ideas that it was hard to find my topic. The next thing I am strong at     is quoting and paraphrasing. Even though I can still do some work at this topic, I find that I am naturally good at this. The "Quote Sandwich" come naturally to me. I also feel that I am successful at finding the right quotes for my writing topic.   This is important because if your examples do not match your topic, they do not mean anything. Finally, story telling is the area that I feel that I am strongest in. This stre...

                My personal goals for next year are to improve paragraph structure, paraphrasing, and my creative writing techniques.  When it comes down to improving paragraphs structures, I tend to have issues organizing what to put in my introduction and conclusion. With my introductions, I tend to put too much context in my beginning. All of my information seems to come out too quickly. I would love to just say enough to get my readers attention and then move on to the next paragraph. With my conclusions, I would like to improve my transitions. I want to lead my readers to want to learn more about the topic I am talking about. I want it to be engaging...not only in the beginning but in the end as well. With paraphrasing, I want to be able to cite properly and portray my ideas through my own words. Also having great punctuation skills and good quoting skills would make me more successful my sophmore year. Lastly, my writing techniques coul...

               Some areas that I still need work on are Reading comprehension, organization, and sentence fluency. Reading comprehension has always been a struggle for me. I struggle with putting things that I have read into words. it especially difficult to expressing myself  when it comes to the characters quotes. Another area that I still need to work on is my organization skills. When organizing your writing you want to make sure that you even out your quotes, facts, and examples. I struggle with this because I normally end up with way more facts than examples or quotes. I also have a hard time with knowing were to put certain pieces, my facts are very dispersed. Finally, sentence fluency is a area that I have gotten better, but still need work on. I need to work on using different types of sentence structures. A major part of this is repetition. I often find myself repeating the same phrases or words, which could agitating for the reader...

                 I am a better writer now than I have ever been in my life. Even though writing has never been my strong suit, I really feel like this English course has developed me into a better writer. This change in writing has occurred because of the constant repetition of writing and a great teacher.                  My personal narrative was a good experience to write this portrait about. While preparing for my personal narrative I had so many different creative ideas in my head that I had trouble making a decision on what to write about. I wish I had this problem on other writing assignments because I normally struggle to find things to write about. Once I narrowed my topic down to the small town of Thibodaux - I was ready to write. As I was writing this piece, I felt as if words were just flowing through me. Not once while writing that project did I experience writers block. As I wrote t...