Cory Fife's Portfolio

Throughout my time in this class, I felt like I’ve grown in two major groups, and those are creative writing and communication, but mostly about communication. Creative writing is any writing that is outside the normal standards and to make something original and well developed.With this reflection, I can discuss about how I grew in creative writing in the 8th grade with projects that mostly influenced this growth. With this growth, I had also grown in Communication, which can benefit to writing.

One example of this growth is a project we had done in this class that I think this growth can connect to and that is the This I Believe essay. This was a project we had done around the 3rd quarter of the school year where we had to create an easy that included a belief that you thought was important to yourself or affected you and/or others you know. Our goal was to create a professional draft of our essay and to use a software called Audacity to record us reading our own essay. We started to create our draft based upon a gallery walk that helped us think of what type of belief we could use. My belief was about everyone having some sort of creativity in them. After this, we got to work on our first drafts. I thought that I had done well on my first draft until critiquing came by. We had gotten critiqued by both our peer and previous 8th, who are now 9th graders. After the critiquing process, I observed my draft and realized I had more mistakes than I thought I would have. But with this feedback, I would create a more professional and detailed essay. I had worked hard to make my essay the best I could produce. After completing our final or second draft to be more detailed was critiqued by our LA Teacher, Ms. Schultz. During this process, I learned a little bit of transactive writing. Transactive writing is trying to convince someone of something, but this was not allowed for this project. I had also learned more about personal essay writing vs. personal narrative. They both reflect on person’s life, but a personal essay writing focuses mostly on reflection of self and growth, a personal narrative emphasizes the story to bring it more to life. But after all of this, it wasn’t the difficult part. The most difficult part had been the audio we had to record of us reading our essay. But before that, One artifact I think made my growth in was my critiqued draft by my peers and 9th grade because this showed to me what I needed to perform greater in on my essay and I took every single one into consideration. With the writing of this project, I had learned about self-reflection. Self-Reflection is what we want to write about based upon our own actions, behaviors or character of the person themselves. I had also grew in creating a better claim/evidence/reasoning for my essay because instead of talking about what we grew in In a project, we were looking over what we grew with ourselves over time with a belief, so it had been easier to write because only you know yourself well enough to do these sort of obstacles

We had done the audio for not long, but it felt as if it took forever. I had struggled to basically read what I had on me because I had some trouble communicating what I wanted and what I wanted to say didn’t come out like I wanted it to. This made me think I couldn’t finish because I would keep messing up on what I wrote, during each try, I got better and with my final recording, I had succeeded in reading my

essay calmly and made the words flow together with ease. This made my think about how clarity of thought came into play with this part of the project. This was about expressing how we thought of our personal grow and talk about how we did so and I thought I had done well enough about talking about this, I would include this into part of content that showed in this project to me.

One last piece of evidence that shows my growth in both creative writing and communication is writing scary stories. This isn’t part of our class, but I like to read them out to my peers, so I could include this as a growth. I like to think of things that could be not menacing or scary and to make them scary or terrifying for people to think this could come from something so small or fragile.

As this reflection comes to a close, I would like to say that during this project I grew well both with in school experiences that will help me in more projects like this and outside school to create more stories thinking that with more projects coming, I can grow like this again to help me with my stories and with other projects.