Portfolio Preface

I am a procrastinator to the core. This is a habit that I just can’t seem to break. Because of this I often find myself sitting down at the very last minute to write a paper or work on assignment. I have gotten pretty good at this since high school, but I won’t argue that my work could be better if it wasn’t rushed through at the last minute. I’m sure I’d need multiple therapy sessions to get to the root cause of this habit, but in a nutshell I think it’s because I thrive off stress (the good kind) and a little bit of chaos. If my life, work, career was boring I don’t think I could handle it. So I’m overly busy, involved in too many activities and only happy when all this is going on. Waiting until the last minute to write a paper, provides a little bit of motivating stress and a rush to the deadline because of this I continue to procrastinate. One would think that it would be very difficult to continue this pattern in a six week summer session for any subject, let alone an English course with a considerable amount of writing. Unfortunately, I still found myself procrastinating down to the day papers were due. I would get off work at five o’clock and rush home to power through the paper that would be due before midnight that night. Of course this caused a lot of unnecessary stress and worry but in the end the assignments were always completed and received decent scores. Not only did my writing evolve throughout the last six weeks, I tried to evolve in the process in which I completed my assignments as well. By the last two papers, Position and Research, I was at least completing all my research early in the week and drafting a detailed outline by mid-week. I didn’t completely rid myself of the procrastination habit, but I am proud of the change I made and believe it helped me in the writing of our last two assignments.

I hadn’t written anything but research papers, emails, and procedures in the last ten years prior to this course so the thought of analyzing an article or arguing with or against another authors point scared me. MLA format, what was that? I was so used to APA format this scared me even more. As the summer session went on, the assignment requirements called for lengthier papers yet somehow they became easier for me to write. The first paper, the rhetorical analysis, while only 3 pages, took me the longest to write. I was too scared to type anything. I would type a line, reread it, and then, certain it didn’t make sense or wasn’t what Professor Bolaski was looking for, I’d hit delete. My confidence in my writing ability was slightly boosted when the first paper was returned with a decent score. By the last two papers my writing came much easier to me, no longer was I afraid of the writing process or MLA.

For this, my final assignment and portfolio I thought long and hard about what order to arrange my work in. The easiest of course would be chronologically or from favorite to least favorite, but I wanted to arrange it in a way that reflected more about what I learned from this summer session. The arrangement of my writing portfolio reflects the challenges I had during this course. The hardest assignment for me to write is displayed first, and so on. Arranging the assignments this way illustrates my evolution as a student and a writer during this course.

I’m surprised at how much I learned in a six week online course, not just about MLA formatting but about the different types of writing and the purposes behind each. I hope to take the principles learned in this course through assignments, readings, and the much appreciated feedback from Pofessor Bolaski onto my critical thinking course and writing endeavors. I’m still a procrastinator but no longer scared of writing.