Hello Everyone!

Welcome to my Composition to Creative Expression portfolio. This website will include the work I completed for four major assignments my first semester of my freshman year here at City College. Starting with my first major assignment, my Personal Narrative Essay, I really enjoyed the concept of starting a new academic journey by reflecting and sharing with others a past academic journey. Meanwhile I wrote about my experience of transforming a one page micro-play into a small scene that was performed by my peers, many others in my class spoke about their experiences of, for example, using writing as a way to learn English was a second language or their struggles with it. Overall, the assignment was a great way to help the class connect with one another and feel less like strangers, even over a zoom call.

The next major assignment was the Annotated Bibliography. Now I can’t lie, as you will see me state in my last major assignment, I am not a big fan of researching at all. I find the process very tedious and lengthy and at times just wish I can cite “Just trust me” as a source when writing essays. This assignment, however, helped me with forming better habits and being more aware of the sources that I do find for my essays. Although the process may have gotten a lot longer, I was able to learn how to find reliable sources and to not only look at the contents of the article I may be looking at but also of the credentials of the person writing the piece was well in order to test its reliability. The library sessions we had with Professor Crowley from the music library at the City College campus and the CRAAP worksheet really helped me with doing so.

Now let’s move on to the Research Essay itself. This essay felt like it was maybe the second longest essay process I have every been through, right behind another history research essay that I had written my junior year of high school. When I first saw the syllabus and saw that this seemed to be the only lengthy and major essay for the class, I was a bit confused because it seemed like we had way more time than needed to complete a research essay. However, as soon as we began to physically write the essay and not prepare, I quickly saw just how fast time flew and was really appreciative of the way that the work for the essay was spaced out. In the long run, I think that the process we went through of first being introduced to how to properly conduct research, then implementing our new skills to create an annotated bibliography and having two drafts instead of one before handing in a final draft was really helpful in making sure I paced myself and didn’t leave an entire essay until the night before it was due.

Finally, the last major assignment was the Self-Reflection Essay. Similar to this welcome page, I was able to sit down and, well, reflect on this semester. Typically, I always felt like I struggled with reflection sheets because there’s always the question of what have you learned and how have the skills that was taught in class stuck with you. With this class, however, I felt like the reflection came with ease like it has with writing this page. I have experienced a lot of different techniques and ways to write an essay, but especially with being on zoom for two years it felt as though I almost forgot how to write an essay and all the habits I should maintain to do so. I was really worried about coming to college and having to write a really big essay and not being able to do it but I feel as though this class was able to east me through the process and I genuinely mean it when I say that there has been skills I was able to learn that will stay with me.

Thank you for an amazing semester!

-Leslie