Writing on Trial Final Portfolio | Page 6

Waking Up , quarter three , poem , page 18 A few days before writing this piece one of my mother ’ s friend passed away and I accompanied her to the funeral . Days after I just kept thinking on how hard it would be losing my mother . I started this piece with the idea of talking about my daily routine , but realized that my mother is a key element of my routine , therefore , I started to write about how would my routine feel without my mother and ended up writing a piece about a daughter who lost her mother . At first , this piece was going to be like a diary entry about my life but after rereading it , I change it to a poem and made a daughter lose her mother . My peers told me to change the story a bit to make it more dramatic therefore , I added all the details about what my aunt had told me to do . I also changed the ending and made it not too sudden by adding in the end the comment about enjoying life everyday . This piece ’ s objective was to value my routine and how certain people are essential in it . I loved how it ended up and consider it to be a good piece because I normally do not deal with such emotional topics . Probably , my strength in this piece was the description at the beginning about how my routine starts , “ I put on the clothes I choose last night , Unplug my computer , Placed it on my backpack , And then walk downstairs .” This description adds a lot to the story because it sets time and place to the story . Probably my weakness in this piece is the lack of expanding moments . In this part , “ My dad arrived home and told me to stop worrying , She had been sick for months , yet I was never notified ..”, maybe adding a bit more background about what the mother had and about the dad ’ s reaction would have made the piece better . I decided to include this piece in my final portfolio so that the reader is able to enjoy the various themes I wrote throughout the years . Especially because I hate to write about very emotional things , but in the end the piece ended up having a very powerful message .
Minutes Turn Into Hours , quarter one , poem , page 22 The first idea for this piece really sparked after watching a movie called " Mascotas " with my little cousins at the movie theater . The movie was literally about a pet ' s life when the owner is not in the house . The movie made me think of tons of things and the idea of pets talking made me want to write about it . Overall I think that this piece was fairly good for being the first I ' ve written all year long . Plus , I think it was a good piece because I normally like to write prose , but in this case I took the risk to write a poem . Maybe it is not the best I have written , but I think it shows effort and the poem actually is understandable and makes sense to the reader . Revision really helped me improve my writing . Overall , the feedback that helped me the most was the peer-editing in the google doc . Teresa ' s feedback was great ! Her feedback really helped me rearrange the flow of the story by starting the story the way it ends so that it made more sense . She also helped me rearrange the use of repetition . “ Passing through so much . Yet never have I told her anything .” I consider this to be the best excerpt of the entire poem because it really sums up all the story and makes the reader really understand what the whole point of the poem was . My overall weakness was the use of very simple adjectives that really did not add a lot of feeling and emotion to the poem . I choose this poem for my final portfolio because it is a very fun piece to read and aboards a totally different point of view . I really liked that I focused on dogs instead of humans and that was fun to work with because I used a lot my imagination .
Sorry , quarter four , prose , page 25 The idea for this piece evolved after one of my best friends had a fight with her best friend . The both were acting really weird so I asked my friend about the situation and used their problem as an inspiration for a piece . At first , I was going to write the story as it was simple , they had a fight because my friend did not answer the other ’ s call . But , as I started to write the piece I made their problem much more complex and created a very unexpected ending . I brought this piece to a paper pass and the feedback I received was amazing ! Most of the team agreed on the same things and that made me realize that indeed I had to remove details such as what she was wearing because it took away the importance of the actual storyline . They also helped me develop the ending because at first they would end up being together , but that was very cliché . Using the feedback I changed the entire ending , probably one of the best I wrote throughout the year . This is a very good piece , I feel super proud about it because my main focus was working on an unexpected ending and that was accomplished in the piece . In this piece I tried to use a lot of emotions , that was probably one of my strengths . “ My hands kept sweating and my head started to hurt . There were just tons of possibilities I could not stop overthinking the situation .” This quotation really shows how I tried my best to describe an anxiety attack . Overall , this piece needs a lot of work in transitions because sometimes the jump of ideas feels too sudden and makes the plot somewhat unclear .
6 of 33