​English 1102

Dear Reader,

    As you look and read through my e-portfolio, I hope you get to see and understand the concepts that I have talked about throughout the e-portfolio. Not only that, I hope you see the purpose of this e-portfolio as well which is writing is unique and it’s like art, that you can express yourself through words, like I am now! Reflecting back on this semester, I have seen the way I look at college English classes and writing in a different way. As I have progressed through this semester and even this year I had to different English classes. In my opinion, English is not one of my strong suits and I did poorly in English classes back in grade school, but ever since I came to college and I took my first to English classes, my grades and performance has improved! My logic for this is that back in grade school, we learning how to write, grammar conventions, how to spell words, so on and so forth; but in college, you don’t go over things like that. Instead we talked about, for this course anyways, Discourse, discourse communities, inquiry, and genre theory, which all interested me. Because of this college English classes do not go over the grade school curriculum, but go into depth about what things are such as what is a discourse community? Secondly, my writing has dramatically improved throughout the semester. Compared to grade school, where we had to write concrete, five paragraph essays, but here in college we are told to branch out from that. Since then, my writing has improved. My logic behind this is that I was so conformed to the five paragraph essay, I was limited to what I wanted to say and truly express myself. Now that I am in college, although we have to write long papers. I am not limited to five paragraphs, and so each work that I create is an art because I can now freely say what I want to say, and express my opinions with a limit to how much I can write.

    As we progressed through the semester, we talked about several topics. The first of which was discourse community. After learning about what it is, I was really intrigued that one person can be involved in many discourse communities and still be very knowledgeable in all of them. For example, I am part of many discourse communities and to list a few: lifeguarding, swimming, running, ROTC, college, and many more. The next concept we went over was Discourse. In essence, Discourse is how a discourse community talks, dresses, believes, thinks, feels, and does. Another topic we covered was inquiry, which is essentially the process of asking questions. From this concept, I really learned how to develop an educational and discourse community correct question through a series of steps. Ever since this concept was introduced, I have been using these methods in everyday life to ask and answer questions. The final concept we learned was genre theory. In this concept, we learned that genres are all interconnected in shape or form and also that each discourse community uses multiple genres, and all are interconnected in that community. Having all this new knowledge is great but as German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.” From this quote, we had a project where two other students and I had to come together as a group to use these concepts and develop an inquiry about an issue in a discourse community that we were involved in or interested in. From that question we had to answer it using peer reviewed sources and make sure we had a clear and evident contribution. Afterwards, we had to take our paper and make an adaptation of the paper. As we were looking for a great adaptation to use, we went back to Dean’s work, Genre Theory, for insight. From this we found this quote: “Genres Are Not Only about Literary Texts Anymore”. From this quote, we decided to take our paper and mold it into a television newscast where we blended our contribution into the middle of the newscast to make it look and feel like a real newscast.

    Looking back on this class, I have learned a lot and my thinking was challenged. Overall though, I have become a writer and I am more knowledgeable on the concepts of the class. I hope you have enjoyed my e-portfolio and you have learned something! Have a great day!

Sincerely,

Jonathan Sanders