Zhang 1

Yishan Zhang

Emre Koyuncu

English 106

29 April 2012

Portfolio

There will always be more room to improve a piece of writing. Even though this last

assignment is aimed to revise two of the previous assignments in the semester, these assignments

can never be perfect. But for the sake of improving these assignments based on the previous

feedbacks and grades, I have made quite a few changes in both assignments.

I find the photo essay to be one of the most interesting assignments in this class, but I

have lost fifteen points in this assignment. Ten points were lost on the missing rough draft, and

five points were lost for the lack of a conclusion. I cannot make up for the ten missing points, but

I have added a conclusion to the end of my photo essay. The introduction and the body of the

essay received a perfect score so I did not bother to make any changes. Since the photo essay

itself was modified, the rationale paper that explains and justifies the photo essay was

subsequently changed. An explanation for the conclusion topic was added onto the conclusion of

the rationale paper, seeking to echo the topics covered in the photo essay.

I struggled with the movie review assignment because I could not organize the numerous

opinions concerning this movie into a smoothly flown essay, and I also struggled with supporting

my claims sufficiently. But mostly throughout the whole assignment I lost points due to small

mistakes such as not formatting the assignment in the MLA format. To fix that I added the tag in

Zhang 2

the beginning of the essay and the “work cited page” header the work cited page. Also there were

many small grammatical errors and bumpy sentences, which I edited those to make the tenses of

all the verbs align and the sentences flow more smoothly. The point which I lost the most points

to were citations; I excessively and incorrectly cited the movie “Grizzly Man” in the paper, and I

cited Ellen Brinks’ article at one point of time in the essay without utilizing her original ideas.

After reevaluating the citations in the assignment, I took out all the end-of-text “Grizzly Man”

citations and edited the place where I incorrect employed Brinks’ article.

The last thing I revised in this portfolio assignment was the work cited page for the fourth

assignment concerning the topic on capital punishment. I repeated forgot t italicize the title “The

New York Times” in the sources, and also I forgot to format the work cited page into Times New

Roman 12 point text with double space. Therefore I fixed those mistakes in the revised version

of the work cited page.