Midterm: Portfolio Reflection

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Midterm: Portfolio Reflection

10/31/2025

From the Midterm Portfolio. . .

Finally, the last thing you will post to the Class Discussion board, is a cover letter, that will answer the following questions . I don’t care how you structure this letter. You can write it as a letter. You can write it like a memo, an essay, a bulleted list. All I want is for you to answer this. Your portfolio cover letter should be about 300 words (but no more than 500). Here are the questions to answer:

Upon reflection, what do you know about yourself as a writer at this moment in time?
How did you get here?
What sort of writer do you want to become, and what will you have to do to get there?

It will be tempting, perhaps, for some of you to sort of blow smoke, if you know what I mean. I get the impulse, but try not to. Try to answer as honestly as you can.

7 Comments

I.S.

11/1/2025 06:43:22 am

At this moment in time, I still feel as though I have a lot of room for improvement in my writing, and that my academic writing is stronger than my creative writing. I find it easier to express ideas and arguments than the worlds and people I want to put into my stories. The education system focuses on academic writing, and as someone who enjoys logic and structure, I fell easily into that comfortable place. Nonetheless, I’ve always loved stories, poems, and literature, but I saw it more as something to be fascinated by, not something I could ever participate in. My senior year of high school was when I reluctantly took a creative writing class. I felt intimidated by the endeavor due to my self-perceived lack of imagination. However, I realized I wasn’t as terrible as I thought I would be and that my imagination just hadn’t been awakened in quite a while. So, I took some fiction writing workshop classes my sophomore year of college, which made creative writing feel less daunting as well. Although I’m unsure of the sort of writer I want to become, I know that I want to be the sort of writer who is always improving and never stagnates in my development. To ensure this, I will continue to seek out different types of writing to read, especially from other cultures and parts of the world. I will have to constantly practice my own writing skills and experiment with them. I will also have to always be open to criticism and other perspectives on my writing. I believe that nothing can ever reach its full potential in complete isolation.

Anna

11/1/2025 12:08:57 pm

Cover letter
Right now, I know that I am a good academic writer. I can write an essay for a class, a literature review, a standard discussion board response, and most of the time I will get a good grade. However, I feel like I am learning to go beyond that as a writer as well, and I am learning that being a good writer in a workplace or in academia goes beyond checking off all those evaluative points I have been used to in school. In my job as a marketing intern, I learned about the importance of writing for businesses to function, and that writing looked different every day for me. There were certain consistencies, such as writing up social media posts, but I learned about responding to requests for services, which ended up looking different each time I wrote one depending on who was requesting the service. In conducting research over the summer, I learned about the importance of language in writing survey questions, as well as being able to talk about my writing to someone with a PhD in Psychology versus an undergraduate math major. I know that I have a lot more to learn in my writing. I am not confident in many genres, and maybe too confident in some. I catch myself equating long sentences and big words to substance, leaving some of my writing feeling flat or emotionless. I want to become a writer who is proud of everything I write, which means building more meaning into my writing. Beginning a project like no one will look at it, getting raw ideas on a page, instead of getting caught up in “sounding smart.” I want to focus more on pouring as much love as I can into projects I really care about. Working on research over the summer was amazing for me because it was my focus, although I was busy with work, it was my only academic obligation, and it helped me fuel it with passion and dedication. I feel stretched too thin now to throw myself into my writing like I did over the summer, so I know that I will need to concretely set aside more time to write if I am going to fuel it in the same way.

Alexandra O'Brien

11/1/2025 01:42:40 pm

This class and putting together this midterm portfolio have made me reflect deeply about what I have learned as a writer over the past few months. It has made me question who I am as a writer. Two things that are very important for someone who wishes to be successful as a writer in the world. And here are a few things I have realized through this process of reflection...

The writer that I am right now sees such value in sitting down every day and trying to write something. Even if it is just one good sentence or paragraph, there is value in discipline and practice. There is value in commitment.

The writer that I am is beginning to love revision and editing. The
writer I was did not always see the joy in these things, but the version of me now, who is constantly challenging myself, looks forward to this writing process.

The writer I am is excited to see the writer I become, because I know I will never stop wanting to learn new ways to read, write, and craft.

The writer I want to become does not fear the editing or revision
process; she fully embraces it. She has also learned to scan her writing for grammatical and structural issues with ease. She aims to improve her craft constantly and put her narrative voice to the test by writing outside her comfort zone and preferred genre. The writer I want to become is patient, inspired, disciplined, and committed to her craft.

I will become the writer I want to be by constantly accepting every
challenge and continuing to seek out knowledge on how to improve my work. Sharing my writing with as many people as possible, asking for feedback. Putting myself in new positions to learn - and by promising myself never to stop imagining, never to stop reading, and never to stop being curious about the new ways I could be writing.

Glen Beaulieu

11/3/2025 02:43:23 am

I know that I am still a very timid, unsure writer. While I am confident in my ability to write in an academic sense, I struggle with having confidence in my ability to write and share the kind of fiction that I want to write, so lot of my time is spent deleting the things I have written or stopping once I reach a moment where I feel unsure or stuck. I have a hard time finishing things because of that. However, I am also the type of writer that is obsessed with the little details. I love thinking about how to make things feel realistic and plausible, especially when I’m writing science fiction. Some of my favorite things in fiction are the weird little idiosyncrasies characters have that can be felt through their actions and dialogue. I struggle with balancing my tendency to overexplain with my want for having all these little details in my stories, so my attempts at adding these little details doesn’t always work in the way that I want it to. I got here, in part, because of my tendency to think more about the stories I would like to write rather than actually writing. I find it very difficult to just jump in and start writing; I like to have some kind of idea of where I want to start, and where I want to go. I’m also just somebody that is pretty private, so it’s difficult for me to be vulnerable, even if it’s only on the page. I want to become a more confident writer that is willing to make mistakes and be misunderstood. I want to make writing a hobby that I do more often, so that I may, one day, be able to get published or even make it a viable career path. To do that, I have to keep writing, but I also need to share my work more with others. After this semester, I may want to try to write something to post on a subreddit about amateur fiction or something. Maybe I’ll try to submit something to The Bridge, or something else like it. I want to find a book club once I graduate, so maybe I can find a writing club somewhere as well. Right now, though, that’s a bit too big of a leap for me. I’m hoping that, as I make more of an effort to write daily, that my willingness to share more will come.

Ashley Luise

11/3/2025 08:06:08 am

I know how to successfully wield the power of my voice as an academic writer. I have written and edited essays, research papers, discussion posts, and academic articles over the course of my college career, and I consider myself relatively competent in each of these areas. I think I am successful in these areas because I know my audience, whether that be my professors or peers, and what they need or want as readers. I credit a lot of this understanding to my experience as a reader, and I want to continue branching out as a reader so I can better understand different and more specific audiences’ needs and wants as my writing branches out to these audiences.

I consider myself a reader before a writer, and my own writing often takes inspiration from the writing I enjoy and find effective. My earliest memories of writing are stories I wrote in elementary school, which were inspired by my favorite books. As reading became more of a chore than a passion for me in high school, my writing followed suit. I never considered myself a weak writer then, but it is obvious that there was no passion in my written voice at that time. As I have moved through college, I have gotten the chance to interact with professional and academic writing that allowed me to rediscover my passion for reading and widened it to more genres. I was learning how to write in these genres as I was reading in them, and I found my passion returning to my writing as well. While I still find myself gravitating towards a career in professional writing, I have rediscovered the passion for creative writing that I haven’t had since I was young; I know being a writer in both of these areas, even if my creative work is just for fun, will always be a part of my life.

I have always thought of myself as a strong writer, but I want to become one who is more trusting of all my ideas, especially those that initially feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable to me. As I’ve moved through my college career, even just in this class, I’ve found that I have a tendency to not give myself the chance to take risks and bet on myself as a creative. However, when I do allow myself to do more low-stakes writing where I can be adventurous and creative, I’ve realized I am better at it than I allow myself credit for. I am a firm believer that practice makes progress; even though being more trusting of myself as a writer, thinker, and creative doesn’t require practice to the same extent, I believe working at this skill can follow this same motto. I hope to make free and otherwise low-stakes writing endeavors a regular part of my life to allow myself the chance to trust my ideas and see where they take me, regardless of what my pieces become.

Nina

11/3/2025 07:33:17 pm

To Whom It May Concern,
I can confirm, with every once of fiber in my soul, that I enjoy writing. A bit over dramatic, don’t you think? But it is a bit dramatic, when you really think about it, or maybe when I really think about it. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out what my “thing” was. It wasn’t sports, I couldn’t find it in a science lab, and there was no way I was finding it in a business meeting full of accounting-bro-turned-finance-dudes. Thank goodness for five paragraph essays, am I right? But all jokes aside, I really did find my thing with writing, so much so that I actually want to pursue writing professionally. I don’t think I would have come to this conclusion any sooner than stepping foot on a college campus. Sure, writing was okay in high school, but something about it in college flipped a switch. Now, I’m not talking about those foundational writing classes everyone is forced to take. I’m talking about the experience I got writing for the school newspaper; about the creative writing workshops and the public relations case studies and the assignments that ask me what I think. I feel like I’ve learned how to capture my voice in a vial and spread it like ink over pages. I can’t imagine my life without writing, so I’m going to keep writing. I want to become a writer that works for a company and create content that helps people understand the company’s values as well as boost their online engagement through written communication. I know that a lot of writing positions are independent, but I crave interaction on a daily basis. With that in mind, I know I can get started in this endeavor by networking and continuously practicing writing. I want to connect with different professionals and even other students to learn about their experiences in the field and how they see success for themselves. I think that as long as I have the opportunity to write for companies and/or brands who’s missions and values align with my own and get me meeting new people, I will feel successful.

Hoping for the best, for you and for me,
Nina Hamel

Paul Sweeney

12/23/2025 08:48:19 am

As a writer, I know that if nothing else I have strong ideas. I have good concepts that I like to explore in depth. Or at the very least, I like the idea of exploring them in depth. I tend to struggle with actually seeing these ideas through beyond talking about the concepts or basic drafts that don't get very far. I think I do have skill in my writing, even if I tend to use too many qualifiers and filler words. I think that stems from a desire for accuracy in my language, so I overcorrect and overfill sentences with unnecessary language. Still, I'd like to think this is something I've been working on over the course of my time as a writer and which I'll continue to work on as time goes on. I definitely think the feedback from my peers over the course of this semester has helped me sharpen my skills to some extent. Pointing out a lack of thematic cohesion or reptition in parts of my writing that I may not have otherwise noticed is something I'm receptive to, and in general I want to be someone who can properly evaluate criticism without taking it personally but also while not taking all of it as gospel. Sometimes I will get feedback that I understand the perspective of but I still ultimately won't put into use because I don't think it will improve my work.

I think my future is more in writing as a hobby than as a career. I do want to write at least one novel some day, but that day is a long one off for me, and as of right now I lack the stamina or the experience to even approach making novelist a career path. Getting my work out is more important to me than the comensation that comes with it, anyway. Not to say I wouldn't like to be paid for my work, of course, but that I want to write primarily to share stories rather than for the sake of monetary gain.

Midterm: Portfolio Reflection

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