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Kiran Koirala
Final Portfolio Essay
Professor Ingram

Intro: I have learned many things about my personalities and myself in this class over
the semester. I have never expected the class would be like this ever, but I have realized
that this is one of the best experiences to have as a person and as a writer. Before I came
to this class, I felt like writing was nothing, for I was good at math, but it turns out
writing is also for people like me. I have learned the importance of writing in this class,
the weaknesses and strengths of my writing style and how I should go about writing in
the future. Also I learned that there were other kinds of writing other than boring old
Academic writing. Throughout this course, I have slowly gotten the habit to find mistakes
with my writing, changing it to fix my writing and improving as a whole in the writing
process.

Home: The layout of the Home page is very simple. It has little introduction to my
portfolio and my name on the top followed by a button that takes the audience directly to
my final portfolio essay page. The page also gives various signs and symbols with hidden
meanings that only some people will understand. First, the ray of lights coming down
from above the trees represent the knowledge I have gained and how the darkness has
gone replaced with knowledge that I acquired. The hidden meaning is that Kiran in
Nepali means rays of light, which only I or somebody else who understood Nepali
would understand.

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Organization: The organization of the Portfolio is very simple. First I would want the
audience to read the guide to the portfolio, Final portfolio Essay. This will help them
around on what I had written down and how they should interpret it. It will clear up any
confusion the audience might have and elaborate on the implied meaning of each essay.
Then the next tab in the top is Portrait of the writer essay. It will explain all the things
about my writing, how I start, how I brainstorm and everything that I do. It will also give
background information on writing building suspense and excitement for the literacy to
come. Then I have the blogs, showing how I have improved over time. Each six blogs has
different ways of writing and shows slow transition towards the improvement of my
writing. Finally Audiences can dig through my writing over the course, going over
Literacy in one of my favorite things, soccer. I will include a video of my favorite team to
personalize the website while giving them excitement. They will also go through small
yet powerful readings and writings we did in class concluding the portfolio.

Final Portfolio Essay: Final portfolio essay explains the meaning and the work I did for
each of the materials that was done in class. It also explains the organization of the path
and sets the path for other pieces of writing and work we did in class. It shows why I
included everything I did, and why I chose them to represent what I did in class. I had
analyzed the important materials in class, which is included in the bottom of the page. I
used different modes of communication in each page of my e-Portfolio. As I learned
through feedback from Ms. Ingram in my Portrait essay, I am pretty good at choosing the
correct word for assignments we did in class. I tried to do this even more on the final
draft of every one of them. I used different color on each of the title, and the body

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included making a consistent display for the audience. I included some videos to explain
what we did in class. The organization is slowly building up to all the works we did in
class, giving the reader the pleasure of reading the best work in last. They first read the
guide, then about the writer and finally about what the writer likes and other writing he
did in class.

Portrait of the Writer Essay: After reading the final portfolio essay, the audience will
proceed to portrait of my writing to understand more about what kind of writer I am and
everything else about my writing. I started this essay by saying, I think it is natural to
question the importance of writing, especially when you are not majoring in writing or
English. This may be horrible way to start an essay because I am in a writing class, but it
is really catchy. It will raise many questions about why it is natural for others to not care
as much about writing. People who are really into writing would want to know why it
would be natural for other people to think this way. Others may empathize with the
statement and start reading the paper. After the hook, I included an anecdote about my
high school experience with my writing, and how careless I was with it. I wrote My
perspective towards writing has completely changed, yet my writing is the same way to
show the transition of me as a writer from high school to college. It also shows my
willingness to change while showing the difficult task that it is. Then I included my
writing rituals and process of my writing. I also included many things that I do behind the
scene to improve my writing.
This is the essay I believe I spend the most time on during the class because we
had all the materials like side-shadowing, Intro and conclusion rewriting and many other

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things. I believe this essay really helped me to think critically and understand my paper
more clearly making decision on the importance of each and every one of the paper.

Blogs: The most important article that I read in this class was in Blog 4(The Case for
Conversational Writing). It not only help me understand myself, but also understand what
kind of writer I am and how I can go about it in the future. It gave me better idea about
my choices before and how I can change them. All six blogs were very informative and
showed the transition of myself and the class throughout the semester. Blogs added
personal things to writing and combined them to make writing very enjoyable for me.
The topics were solid for most of them, and you could have a voice inside each. The
overwhelming majority wont be writing academic prose in their professional lives, so
why should we be teaching it to them in college, much less high school? This quote
made me think about the importance of anything that I was doing and anything that might
come up in the future. It made me more aware of the mistakes that I was making by
questioning many things in writing.
Other blogs were great too. They help me prepare for the assignment that we were
going to do in class. The fifth blog helped me start my final portfolio essay and eportfolio. The third one taught me that there are different kinds of writing and dialects
everywhere, so whatever I was writing or speaking is not wrong. It made me feel more
comfortable with my writing. I think doing blogs were awesome thing to do. The second
blog introduced the topic of having different dialects and raised the question on how to
use it inside a classroom. It raised many questions and helped me aid with the acceptance
of any kind of writing I do inside and outside of the class.

Literacy Narrative: This essay also made me feel comfortable with my writing
especially when we connected this essay to literacy. How can sports be connected to
writing? I never thought I would be writing about soccer in college. This was the first
writing assignment and I thought it would be like a ten page report since this was writing
in college, but it actually helped me adapt to this new way of writing in college.
I tried to make this essay as interesting as possible because this is the last essay
the audience is going to read. I want to make them feel excited about what I was writing
about. I was also trying to show off my skills to the readers and explain everything I
learned through this writing. I have already built who I am, and I have given the audience
the guide to my portfolio, so this will be the only essay and only chance to prove that I
have improved over the course. I had to edit this essay a lot. It is fascinating how sports
are great influence to people. This was my first hook. I thought that would be
interesting, but I was just stating that I am interested in sports, not any of my readers.
After I did the forth blog, I started wondering if I could make it more conversational so
that I could invite others inside the circle, not just people who like sports. I thought about
it and change it to The summer had just started and the pressure of school had gone.
This was more like a hook because it starts a story, and everybody can relate to it. It also
catches the readers attention.
The body was horrible as well. I thought I would fall asleep in the middle if I did
was reading the paper like that myself, so I had to rewrite the entire thing. I questioned
the importance of every paragraph and every sentence, and made it so that it fulfills its
purpose as well as interests the reader. I learned about expanding the paper using imagery

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and personification. I also learned about what point of view I am supposed to take and
which one would be better using. There are only couple of sentence that I would choose
to include from the draft which really shows the change I went through in the middle of
the semester.

Artifacts:
Plans for Revision Artifact

Revision is one of the best things that we did all semester. I think the inclusion of this
revision proves my ability to make judgment on my own paper. I have done many things
that would help me in my writing process and things that would helped me achieve my
goals. This signifies the beginning of understanding what I did and what I wrote. I started
looking our even the smallest materials in the paper. I can see that I started to look for the
purpose in each sentence and changing it the way audience like it. With the triad, we have
learned that we have to consider the audience and purpose the most. This really shows
that I have started looking out for the things that are most important. The conclusion
sentence of my second paragraph does not transition good. Sure it would have been
better to say transition well at the end, but what I really see when looking at this is not the
wording choice but how specific I was. It really showed that I started caring about little
things in writing which I believe will help me the most in the future.

Note Artifact

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The notes were really useful especially this one. This I consider is the framework for
whatever is to come and whatever we did in class. I really focused on the triad this
semester. Multimodality and Genre were two things that we talked about. Aristotles
Appeals are going to be important in the future. I implemented triad the most in my
writing. Every time I reviewed the paper, I started looking at purpose and audiences. This
especially started after blog 4, when I realized that being a good writer is not about giving
all the information but about what I would do with my writing that makes it more
interesting to the person who is reading it, having purpose in each and every word I
speak. Of course, I am not perfect, but I think this artifact pushed me to understand more
about the triad and showed me the path for improvement.

Wild Cards:
Intro and Conclusion effect of Michael

This is the wild card section and I think this fits it perfectly. This was the assignment in
which we had to exchange our paper, read it and try to make better introduction and
conclusion. Michael did a really great job that I used most of his work on my paper. He
worded it better saying Every day is a day for improvement, an opportunity to
strengthen... My word choice was far worse and I thought I should improve on that at
the time. He also described my paper which really helped me see how my audience
would view my paper and how they would react to it. I learned many things from what he
noticed because I did not want anyone to notice some of the things, which he did. I also
learned that it should be very simple for audience to understand every bit of my paper. I

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also learned the importance of organization and how to use powerful word if I wanted to
stress something.

RRL #3
How can I write about a class without writing about something I struggled in class? This
article was complicated. I am a very straightforward person. As I mentioned in the
POTW, I usually wants to tell the intended audience whatever they desire and be over
with. So, I thought of this article as the same kind of material. I was really interested in
the word access vs. excess, then he changed the topic. I became confused the whole way I
read the paper. He starts talking about stereotypes and other materials that were
completely unrelated to access or excess. I questioned if he started the topic in the middle
of the sentence and the conflict between access and excess just to hook the audience. At
the end, he connects the dots of multiculturalism, stereotypes and access and excess at the
same time, which was also one of things that I hated. This article made me think about if
I could understand even the simplest of this genre of writing. Even though Professor
Ingram really got us through the reading, I thought I would not cope with connections in
the writing itself. It would be pretty easy for me to make connections if the topic was
straightforward, but I could not understand it. This helped me understand the flaws in my
way and think more about what I should do in the future.

Overall: The class was fantastic that I signed up for it next semester. I also liked almost
everything in the class. It was learn-centric which really helped me understand many of
the things. I have learned many things that I mixed my writing with and many materials

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that had improved my writing. The only thing that I questioned the importance of, is the
reading we did about how the system works, rather than just reading papers that would
impact our everyday writing. The experience was great, and I think improvement says it
all, it works.

Grade: I sincerely deserve an A. I thought I was not doing enough in midterm to get an
A, but something amazing happened in the middle. I started to see the growth I was
going through, this change I never expected. The effort I put into each work started
changing on its own and the quality in which I wrote changed as well. I have presented
all the required materials of the course. I have made the website look pretty good. I have
considered audiences that is going to read and highlighted important materials, so I
believe I deserve an A.