Hello! My name is Zeli Fernandez, and this is my Digital Portfolio demonstrating all the work I’ve completed and my growth as a writer while attending my Composition for Us Experience FIQWS class during the 2024 fall semester at CCNY. During the semester, I have written and read works of varying genres and audiences in order to improve/gain new writing skills. I’ve had five major assignments that have helped me become a better writer; semi-weekly reflections, learning analysis essay, systemic racism and healthcare research paper, annotated bibliography, and MMT (multi-modal translation). For all of these assignments, excluding the semi-weekly reflections, I had multiple process documents that helped me develop writing and revising skills that will be in the following tabs along with the final product of these process documents. I will describe the importance of the process documents I included to the final product of the assignment.  

Filling out the semiweekly reflections helped me stay on top of my work, it usually previewed work that we’d be completing in a future class or gave more understanding of a previous lesson. It also helped me reflect on the ways I’m improving throughout the class. It is difficult to recognize the progress I’m making without the reminders.  

Before writing my learning analysis essay, I was first tasked to create 3 vignettes describing a moment in my life where I learned an important lesson. This was my first time reflecting on my life in an academic context and through analyzing my previous experiences, I became better at evaluation in general but particularly, evaluating the impact of my experiences. This helped me with writing my learning analysis essay because I had to continue finding moments in my life to reflect on and observe how I’ve changed as a result. After writing the vignettes, I wrote an outline for the paper. This outline helped me develop the drafting strategy of organization and structure. Using this outline allowed me to not overwhelm myself with all the information I needed to include in my essay and served as a check list when I eventually wrote the essay.  

My research paper about systemic racism and healthcare required a lot of process documents because there was a lot of information available on both these topics individually and combined. The first step was creating my annotated bibliography that I will discuss in the next paragraph. The next step was using the sources I found to create an outline for my paper. After having practice with outlining during the learning analysis essay, creating this outline sharpened those skills. I organized the information I gained through the research process in a way that would keep my audience following, which is important since it is easy for a reader to end up confused when reading a large amount of information in one sitting. Structure proved to be even more important in this outline for the reason I previously mentioned. Additionally, I know had to add a rebuttal to my paper and deciding where to put it was made simple in the outline but could’ve been extremely difficult if I done so while writing the essay. The outline also helped me decide what information was necessary to add or was repetitive. With my outline completed, I made a draft that relied too heavily on my outline. My draft included all the necessary information, but it missed my voice. The information was delivered very robotically and was more of a recitation of information than an argument I developed on my own through the information I learned. This is why I decided to include my draft along with my peer review feedback. The feedback told me to add more information after my citation and to talk and interact with my audience instead of spewing facts at them. With this feedback, I improved my revision skills. I looked at my work not as the author but as an audience member and realized how unhuman like I sounded. After listening to the feedback, I can say I am proud of the final product of my research paper.  

The annotated bibliography was truly the backbone of my research essay. It was a collection of all the knowledge I gained regardless of if I ended up using it in my final paper, it helped me gain general knowledge of the relationship between systemic racism and healthcare. I had a draft and peer review for this as well. My draft didn’t include a lot of information because I found myself being overwhelmed with knowledge. I was still in the process of narrowing down my topic and doing research while trying to find a specific topic proved to be more difficult than I expected. The peer review feedback I received was to give the definition of systemic racism and expand on one of the points I already made. This made simplify the way I was originally writing my bibliography, emphasizing that I should talk about key terms before jumping the gun on other information. The more I looked at articles and gave it true analysis, the easier it became to focus on what I was looking for. The draft and the feedback helped me better my research strategies. 

My MMT forced me to completely reshape my original formatting and skill building. Although outlines and structure were crucial in the creation of my MMT, the execution is what mattered most. I worked with another classmate who did the same topic as me and we decided to create a podcast since that is something that media has delved into recently and videos seem to keep people’s attention better than still images. I developed skills in collaboration like time management and communication. We had to find time to work on this outside of class and were always discussing how we can make sure the final product satisfied both of us. After all the previous work of creating the outline and the research paper, coming up with the content was doable, the execution was what needed constant updating, but we were both happy with how the podcast turned out. 

I found it incredibly helpful to have so many process documents and I will continue to use outlines and think critically when answering questions. These stratigies took some trial and error and a lot of outside opinions as well. Large assignments seemed less intimidating after learning, practicing, and sometimes failing different techniques. I hope you can see my progress throughout this semester the same way I can and that you enjoy my portfolio!