Development as a Writer

Student Last Name 1
Student Name
Professor Name
Class
Date
Final Portfolio: Distant Learning
The development as a writer is a long journey. Throughout, I have written different pieces each emphasizing one particular writing skill. In each assignment, I have developed skills in different writing areas and, as such, have become more adept at putting concepts and straying ideas on paper. There are, of course, many lessons I have learned and still more to learn as I write more and practice more. The writing journey I have had so far is, if anything, one now changing my perspective to critically analyze what I write – and read. Indeed, I have learned all along to put everything on pause before I rush and I write anything crossing my mind. This is an all important lesson for anyone writing anything. To pause and check is, after all, to craft, in words, ideas in one’s own style. The lessons I have learned cut, in short, across all aspects of writing spanning punctuation all way up to persuasion and applying rhetoric. To put matters into more perspective, I focus in current final portfolio on writing lessons I have learned from one essay I have written recently: “Distant Learning”. More specifically, I focus on issues of mechanics, word choice, transitioning, evidence and idea development.
For mechanics, I have learned to properly use fillers and prepositions correctly. For example, when I, in order to contract, drop “the” (e.g. “given the current development,” para. 1) I have learned that contraction does not always work and could lead to grammatical mistakes. That is, an ear used to a phrase, the-free, is not reliable to make correct rules in formal writing. This
Student Last Name 2
applies, similarly, to using “at least” instead of “more importantly” (para. 2). The proper use of
punctuation is, moreover, a case in point. Instead of a dash (“&...