Griffin Zetterberg

UWRT
12.4.16
Final Portfolio Essay
When I first saw that I was taking a UWRT course I thought of and heard from numerous
sources of people that it was just a bunch of typing away at boring prompts and adding lots of
fluff to accumulate enough words to satisfy the word count and the teacher. After about two to
three days in the course I realized with my diverse class and fun young teacher it wouldnt be
anything like my preconceptions of the subject. My professor focused on way more than just the
basics such as grammar and punctuation and taught us how to develop and bring out our brains
onto the page. The best thing I learned from the class all year long was the mad man technique
which in a nutshell means the writer of the piece of work wants to focus more on getting every
thought he/she had down on the paper before even thinking about anything such as format,
punctuation or the grammar they are using within it. Before I learned this through reading an
article about the person who created the idea of such technique I would stress over simple things
I sit at my desk for hours on hours trying to figure out how to put everything together it it did
nothing for me nor was it efficient. After getting the technique down, which wasnt hard I was
able to get papers done with increased efficiency on time and you might think this would
decrease the quality of the paper; however, my argument for this is that now I can get all of my
great ideas I have now down before I forget any of them. In sense putting more and all of the
valuable information I have to give to the piece of writing with no loss of work or quality. I also
think that was a good quality of this class in the sense that although for some assignments we
were given a word limit, for most we were told instead of adding unnecessary fluff to reach such
limited enforced on us we were able to keep it short, simple and straight to the point with all of

our writings. This technique helped me a lot with all of my rough draft papers throughout the
year by getting all of the concepts down so I didnt forget about anything.
In this course throughout the semester I discovered that its all about being honest when
writing. It not only affects the way you write but makes the story or paper more personal for
somebody to read no matter the topic. I discovered that it is a lot more time efficient to get
everything down then to spend every single second typing out each and every word and making
sure its perfect. This course will help me and did help me in all of my other classes as I have had
many papers in various courses to write in which the skills I developed in my writing class have
helped me immensely.
Overall, throughout the semester of writing I do not feel as if my writing style has
changed besides the fact that I feel as if this class has made my papers more opinion based rather
than all of my other classes being research based and straight from facts off of the web. This
being said, the only revising and editing done with papers Ive written for this class have been
through peer editing and the thing I had the most trouble with this year that fellow students
noticed and urged me to fix and work on was run on sentences. Other than that it was mainly
small punctuation and grammatical errors here and there. Nothing major, but Im glad this class
taught me other things such as thinking outside of the box about real world things (prompts such
as what impacted your life, events that changed your writing style) in order to be able to get
my true thoughts out for the teacher to read.
For my e-portfolio I have revised all of the other past ones made by previous students and
dissected them completely. Once I got my main ideas down I got to work addressing all the main
components of the portfolio which consist of eight papers: sponsors of literacy, literacy memoir,
literacy memoir adaptation and explanations, identity and authority, response to readings, what is

good writing and what do writers do, contributions to online discussions and lastly the final
portfolio essay. I made a part on the website for each of the following; the front page with
introduction, one tap for each of the pieces of writing and the last one consists of my image I
created for my adaptation of personal literacy memoir. I chose a visual because I felt like it could
express my narrative in a way no others could through imagery and humor. Also, that is the one
that I felt most comfortable with doing.
For the organization and design of the website I used a modern design to create more of a
professional feel with tabs consisting of each of the pieces that you can skim over with your
mouse and opens down a tab to click on in order to review the piece. For this class I feel as if I
deserve an A. This is because I have tried my best to come to every single class this semester and
have done well doing so, also for all assignments I have put forth full effort and have had pretty
good time management in order to do so. Turning in the assignments on time and with good
honest quality were top priorities for me as the writer and I hope it showed. This class has been
really good to me and will help me in my future endeavors with writing. It seemed as if once I
truly understand and got what it is to be writing for the prompt (the criteria), it was then I could
formulate the best paper hitting all the points I wanted to address within the work. I want to
thank my professor Mr. Dada for a wonderful semester and for teaching me things thatll stick
with me through life.