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Meng Xiong Professor Ingram English 1102-001 19 April 2013 Lets Walk it Through Time is flying by so quickly, and the semester is coming to an end, but I still remember the day we started class as if it was just yesterday. The first day of class, when we went over the syllabus, made me feel like this course was going to be a lot of work and would not benefit me in any way, shape, or form except improving my writing and grammars. However, as the semester progressed, I found the assignments helpful and beneficial to me as a biology major. Each assignment was slightly different and challenging in its own way. Nevertheless, I tried to work really hard and do every assignment to the best of my ability. I always did my best on every assignment and made sure that every assignment I did met my own goals and expectations as well as my professors. I arranged my portfolio in the order that I completed the assignments as the semester proceeded. I placed the What Is It like to Be You? essay first, and then the midterm, which is follow by the annotated bibliography, argumentative essay, self-selection pieces, and then the blog.. The self-reflection tab contains the process works, daily entries, responses, and artifacts. Process works contains the rough draft to the argumentative essay, body-bio balance, bubble map, and is good looking skin a healthy skin draft one. Daily entries contain warm ups (2), notes on pg. 79-81, and do and dont lists. The responses section contains the To be Me essay and the Is Good Skin a Healthy Skin draft while the artifact section contains Response by Richard

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and thesis information from the orange text book. The order in which I completed the assignments best show how I learned and how my thinking changed throughout the semester. I still remember reading the book Peace, Butter & Jelly and doing inquiry on the book to get ideas about the research project that we had to do this semester. The book inspired me greatly. It taught me to take pride in my own writing. When I first started writing my What Is It Like to Be You? essay, I was unsure of what I should write, even though the essay was about me. I was not sure if what I put would describe what it is actually like to be me. However, after reading a poem, which I call Own Me through your Words in the Peace, Butter & Jelly book, I had the courage to put down what I think is right and answer the question what it is like to be me. Just like David Seidel said in his poem I took the risk and wrote about my own life and experiences. I wrote a poem about everyday life and obstacles and put it in the form of rivers, rocks, and holes. The poem was used in my What Is it Like to Be You? essa,y and it is as follow: Life flows like a river. There will be rocks, there will be holes. Make sure you can swim and not just float. Dont dream but rather swim To the ocean Risk-taking is the first thing that I learned in this course, and it is one of many key concepts that helped me throughout the course. Risk-taking is what led me to many great ideas that I used in my essay. Just like a first time doing anything, the first time doing a workshop with people you just met is very different and difficult. Providing feeding back to other peoples works was always

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the hardest part for me. I always worried that my suggestions would not be good or not going to be what the author of the paper was looking for. Nevertheless, I always tried my best and did to what I supposed to. I got better with each workshop by using guidelines that I learned from reading Responding by Richard Straub, which is an important artifact that helped me with workshop. I took notes on the Do and Dont, which is listed as daily entries under selfselection tab, that Straub mentions in his essay and used it to help me get better at providing feedback to other peoples essays. In one of the do lists, it says, Explain your interpretation, problems, questions, and advice. This helped me to breakdown every comment that I made into details so that the author could understand when he wanted to make revision. Aside from the Do and Dont Lists, I used the questions from warm-up 2, which is located in the daily entries under the self-selection tab. The questions helped to guide me through each paragraph and make sure that the author stayed on topic and that the topic of the essay was clear. Also, the warm-up questions helped me to make sure that writing a paper is getting out the important points that the author wants his audiences to understand. In workshop I also received a lot of helpful suggestions from my peers and professor. With each of the suggestions that I received, I would always try to come up with a way to better my essay. For instance, as shown in the response section under the self-selection tab, in my What Is It like to Be You? essay, my peer gave me the suggestion that I should add more information about myself and where Im going in my future. I did my best and added as much information as I could because I knew that what they suggested to me actually maked sense and that my audience would want to know that as well. I added, Im currently living off campus and drive to UNC Charlotte whenever I have classes. At UNC Charlotte I play intramural soccer in the fall and spring. I met a lot of Hmong people at UNC Charlotte through sport and I join the Hmong Student Association to participate

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and help out the community. On my free days I would focus on studies hope that one day I would reach my goal and become a pediatrician so than I can help the people in my community, to give my audiences a better understanding of what Im currently doing in my life. Another example would be the suggestion that I received in the second draft of the Is Good Skin a Healthy Skin? essay, which is located in the response section. I added According to Mayo Clinic, vitamin D also helps maintain the level of calcium and phosphorus in the blood. Without vitamin D, your bones would not be healthy and strong. Vitamin D is what increases the bone minerals in bone and decreases fracture. Vitamin D is essential to both the skin and the bones. Therefore a combination of both sunlight and sunscreen would benefit your skin more than just using sunscreen alone or not use sunscreen at all, to give my audiences more information about the roles of vitamin D. This information would help readers to better understand the importance of vitamin D. Without reading Straubs essay and taking notes on it, I would not have learned and benefited as much from workshop as I did. Workshop helped me to improve every piece of my writing and make it better. His essay also contributed greatly to my learning. After a couple weeks into the semester, I was still unsure of what I wanted to do for my research. Then I looked back at some of the activities that we did in class and started to think about how it all connected together. I was looking back at the body-bio balance, which is located in the process work under the self-selection tab, that my group did in class and started to ask questions about broader topics that I was curious about and broke them down into more specific categories. The What is it Mean to be Healthy? bubble map, which is in the process works under the self-selection tab, also contributed greatly as to how I arrived at my research topic. I looked at the bubble map and started to make my own bubble map about my topic. I started with the human body then broke it down into different systems and their functions. From there I

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decided that I was going to do research about skin but was not sure for what I should be looking. As I was doing independent inquiry on skin, I came across a lot of information about skin diseases, but I was not interested in it at all. Then I began to think critically about some of the things that could lead to the disease. That is when I decided to look at skin cancer and what some of the everyday products that we use are or things that we do that could potentially increase our chance of getting skin cancer. Some of the things that I come across were tattooing, smoking, drinking (alcohol), sun tanning, and sunscreens. I then researched for each topic how they contribute to skin disease. Without the body-bio balance and the bubble map as guidance, I would not have come to a conclusion that I did and the search for my topic would be more difficult. It is the body-bio balance artifact and bubble map that helped and led me into a successful inquiry. When I finish doing research for each topic and started to write about it in my annotated bibliography, I was told that my research was still too broad. As I was thinking critically through my research, I found that even though each topic relate to skin and could potentially cause some sort of skin disease, each topic was not really related or did not make a connection together. Therefore, I revisited my bubble map from earlier and tried to find a connection among the topics that I had researched. It was a long and challenging independent inquiry, but I finally eliminated some of my choices and was able to make the connection. My final conclusion was that alcohol is what led to depletion of antioxidants in the skin and leaves the skin vulnerable to the sunlight. The sunlight would then penetrate the skin and cause harm that could lead to cancer. As a result, from fear of getting cancer, we use chemical sunscreen. Sunscreen is not healthy, and it could potentially lead to cancer as well. Therefore, I choose to write about alcohol, sun tanning (sunlight), and sunscreens for my annotated bibliography. The connections among my research

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topics are what improved my annotated bibliography and made for a better and more logical essay. With all the information that I found about my research topics, I started to write about my argumentative essay. Like always, I struggled with how to start the introduction of my paper. As shown in the daily categorize under the self-selection tab, I started to write a rough draft of my paper. I was trying to get an idea of what I should mention and how much time or space I should use for that particular topic to make my paper stronger so that I could make my points. The rough draft helped to give me an idea of how much information I had and how much more I needed to research in order to answer all the questions that that my audiences would ask about my topic. As expected, I still needed more research. Even though I had a lot of information, I was missing the important pieces of information that would counter my audiences argument. For instance, I had information that sunlight and sunscreen are harmful to the skin but did not offer resolutions or ways that both could be beneficial to the skin. Therefore, I did the reading from pages 79-81 in the From Writing to Inquiry book and started getting ideas about how to identify dispute and how to counter it. For instance, to counter claims that a sun-tanning bed is safe, I used a quote from the American Skin Association, which stated, There is no such thing as healthy or safe tan. Regardless of what people use as the source for tanning, it is not healthy or safe. It is also from this reading that learned about when I should summarize or quote from a source. When I started to do more research and put the information together, everything flowed pretty well together and was easy to follow except the thesis statement. I was struggling with my thesis statement because I was not sure how I was going to write it. I knew which side of the argument I was going to support but could not get a thesis statement that was strong enough to summarize my view on the topic. At first my thesis statement was Alcohol, sun tanning, and

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sunscreen use are just some of the many examples that could do harm to the skin. However, my thesis statement was unknown to many of my peers and professor (Ms. Ingram), as shown in argumentative essay draft one in process work under the self-selection tab. I continued to struggle with my thesis statement until I started to do my reading assignments for class. In the reading, I found a lot of good information that helped me to think critically and come up with a better and stronger thesis to state my point of view on the research topic. I came up with my thesis according to the gap-filling model. I feel like even though sunlight and sunscreen are a danger to our skin and could lead to skin cancer, both could be beneficial if one knew how to use them properly. Therefore, I come up with my new thesis statement, which states, Alcohol, sun tanning, and sunscreen use are just some of the many examples that could do harm to the skin. Even though sunlight and sunscreens are bad for our skin a combination of both could be beneficial to our skin and help to keep our skin healthy. The thesis reading assignment, which I used as an artifact under self-selection tab, was really helpful, and it helped shape my essay into a better paper. Before each assignment, we would blog about it. At first, I was unsure of what blogging was, but through independent inquiry, I found out that it is just my opinion or knowledge on the works that I was assigned to do. Blogging was really helpful, and it helped me to think. For instance, the first blog post helped me to plan out what I needed to revised on in my WILTBY essay. As shown in the blog, I wrote, For my second draft I am planning on adding more detail about myself and expand those ideas that are not clear to the readers. I also plan to add a picture to my essay to help the readers better understand the differences between the houses in the country that I came from and the houses that are in America. Blogging was what helped me to think about my essay so that I could revise it and clarify it for my readers.

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This is how I proceed through the semester. I used available resources that I had and made my writing better each time I revised it. Workshop, reading, and revision made my writings such as What Is It Like To Be You? essay, annotated bibliography, and argumentative essay better so that it met my expectation as well as my professors. My final drafts of the essays clearly show that my writing has improved greatly over time. Even though I might not have learned or mastered everything that I should, I am proud to say that I am better at writing a paper, thinking critically, giving and receiving feedback, and independent inquir now than at the beginning of the semester. Therefore, I believe that I should receive an A for the learning and the hard-work that I have shown through the course.