Dear Portfolio Readers,

My name is Melanie Vargas, and at the age of 35 I have decided to go back to college. As if that wasn’t intimidating enough, I notice that English 101  is first on my course list for the Spring semester. Now the anxiety kicks in as I think of punctuations, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and so on. In high school I was average, at best, in English and the thought of college level English really scared me. Much to my surprise this course was nothing what I expected it to be. Instead it was all about writing different forms of essays and learning the process of writing a great essay. I must admit I was still a little nervous about this course, but I was also excited to explore who I was as a writer. I never really considered myself a writer but I was very intrigued to find out if I could be.

The First essay I chose to share with you today is my Ethnography. This essay forced me to not only pay attention to my surroundings when visiting with my uncle at the nursing home, but also to evaluate my process of writing. I began this process first by just jotting down different details that I noticed while walking the halls within the nursing home. I would then go home and try to make a story out of those details I observed that day. I tried to tell it in such a way that the reader would feel and see exactly what I did in that moment. My rough draft seemed to lack detail and just didn’t portray what I was trying to show to the reader. Over the next week or so with several visits to see my uncle, I felt that I now had exactly what I needed to accomplish my goal for this essay. I sat down with all of my notes and composed what I believe to be a great ethnography. I am most proud of the process I took while writing this essay, from jotted details all the way to final draft, I achieved my goal. I hope you enjoy reading this essay just as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Next, I decided to include my memoir. This essay is the closest to my heart and was actually the most difficult for me to write. Not only was it our very first assignment, but also very personal, which I wasn’t used to writing about. In this essay I describe the day that I finally told my best friend that I wanted to be more than friends. It was a very special day for me and I was excited to be able to share it through my words. I enjoyed having to sit down and remember all the details of that day and basically relive it while writing this essay. At the same time it was challenging to write it in such a way that the reader would experience that day along with me. My rough draft was dull, to say the least. I wasn’t discouraged though, remembering that this is the first essay I have had to write in a very long time. I then wrote about three more rough drafts, then finally a final draft came out of all my hard work. I liked that it gave me a chance to show my ability to go from such a dense rough draft to a vividly detailed final draft. This was definitely a very fun essay to write. Please enjoy a special day in my life while reading my Memoir.

Finally, I chose my text wrestling essay as the third entry in my portfolio. For this essay I read and summarized an article about the stress of parenting, and also did some research on the same topic. I specifically chose this article because I do not have children of my own and it was very interesting to me to see just how stressed parents can be. Even though I can’t really relate to the topic, this article had me wanting to learn more. This led me to searching for other pieces of work that had been written on the same topic. I was surprised to find out just how big of  a topic stress among parents actually was. Not only was it an issue between parents, but also nonparents seemed to be getting in on the conversations. Overall, I was excited about writing this essay and sharing everything I had learned on the subject through the summary of this article. I especially enjoyed exploring my ability to pick out the main points of an article and putting it all into my words.

Throughout this semester I have definitely learned a lot about myself as a writer. In our first class the professor asked us who we were as writers and my answer was that I wasn’t a writer at all. As I prepared my portfolio I was thinking what I would say if she asked me again on the last day of class. I believe that I have definitely grown as a writer over the semester, I definitely learned more about the process of writing, but, who am I as a writer? I am a writer who enjoys sharing with her reader, who lives in her stories, and who puts a lot of thought into everything she writes. I guess you can say I am an emotional writer, or  maybe a novice emotional writer would be more accurate.  Either way I have enjoyed the journey of college writing.

Thank You For Your Time,

Melanie Vargas