Patrick Toth

Portfolio Revision

As the semester nears to an end, I have realized that my writing has become more fluent,

meaningful, and academically correct. Before entering this English class, I was not keen on

writing the entire semester. I never did well in high school and believed it would carry over here

at Purdue. However, with the guidance and support of my professor, I have challenged myself,

and as a result, grown to be a decent writer. In this portfolio are two revisions of earlier

assignments. One will notice the drastic change in writing from the earlier parts of the semester

to now. Given proper and encouraging feedback, I was able to successfully revise both

assignments and present it in an effective portfolio.

During the revision of the second assignment, I looked back at the use of Adobe

Photoshop. After the length of the whole semester, I had become pretty familiar with this

program, and therefore, easy to revise my essay. I studied my essay and took note of certain

aspects that were necessary to change and others that needed to stay. After finally observing my

entire photo essay, I referred back to the grade sheet that my professor had given me. I looked at

his commenting and notes and fixed those right away. I also asked him, during a one-to-one

meeting, for some feedback on revising the pictures themselves. We came up with the conclusion

of changing the size settings and the blending options in Photoshop. We both also agreed that it

might be better just to re-take the photo. I decided that in order to receive the highest revision

grade, I needed to re-take the picture. After re-taking two pictures, adding a title, changing my

formatting and blending options, and following the excellent feedback given, I was submitting

my best work for the second assignment of this semester’s work.

The next big task was to fix the third assignment, the comparison/evaluation essay.

Fortunately, I did very well the first time around on this and was not forced to revise a lot during

this process. Seeing as how it was twelve pages long, I was not able to re-read or re-write the

entire paper. I focused solely on the feedback given from my professor. I relied on his

commenting to help me revise this paper. I noticed that I had a lot of tense issues, some

grammatical corrections, and wording problems. I fixed those right away, giving me time to

worry about the more important revising. In the feedback, it mentioned that my source

integration was weak when it came to the verbs of authorial action. It also stated that my claims

were primarily personal convictions. I asked again for some advice and received great advice. I

was told to look to the “They Say I Say” book and find better verbs of authorial action. That was

simple enough. After, I worked on obtaining solid facts to support my claims and giving the

reader more reason to follow my claims. After completing this long revision, my third

assignment was finished and also submitted with the comfort of satisfaction.

To wrap my portfolio up, I need to mention that the feedback given to me this semester,

on all of my assignments, has been very beneficial. It has improved my writing from the

intermediate level to a scholarly level. I’ve been pleased with the time put into grading my

assignments and therefore, only seeing it respectful to put the same amount of time into revising

these two assignments to the best of my ability. In my belief, a successful writer is the one that is

able to receive loads of critique and spend days on end revising one paper multiple times,

because in the end the paper will be flawless. That was the purpose of this class and I have

neared that goal during the first semester here at Purdue.