Dear Rebecca,

Through out this class, my knowledge has grown in various ways. This course was not
just about writing papers even though I did get to experience several different writing styles. I
learned more about the depth that literacy contains and what discourse communities actually are.
It honestly surprises how much depth was behind the two main concepts we talked about in
class. I loved how we incorporated different writing styles into all of the lessons we did.
As a writer, I feel as if the more experience I got with the different styles of writings we
did I got better. The blog writings were probably the easiest out of all. The blogs were some of
my favorite assignments to do because I got to reect on a piece of work that we did in class. By
doing this it made me take the time to actually sit down and realize the purpose behind the
assignment that we did. One of my favorite assignments that we did was the literacy map of
Juniors life. It made me realize that writing does not always have to be by reading words off of a
paper, it can be visual too. Although some of the writing pieces we did seem to get easier with
time and practicing them, other pieces were not as simple. Some of the writings that challenged
me were the buzz feed style of writing and the ethnography. The buzz feed was complicated to
me because I have never wrote in that style before and I did not quite understand what I was
getting out of it. By far the most complicated piece was the ethnography because it was more
time consuming than any other writing project I have ever had to do. The process of the paper
made it difcult to get my head wrapped all the way around it. It did not bother me to observe
but it was harder to consume everything that was going on around me at one time. It was also
hard to compare the information I got from observing to the criteria of what a discourse
community really is. It was denitely an assignment that challenged me in this course.
In my portfolio, the artifacts I chose were some that I thought would show my knowledge
from the beginning and how it improved throughout the summer semester. In the literacy section
I chose artifacts from the beginning such as notes to show that I did not really know the true
meaning of what literacy was. Also in this section I chose artifacts to show different writing
styles and different assignments that showed the depth of literacy. The discourse community
section holds a lot of similar ideas but not artifacts. In the portfolio, I tried to show you how my
knowledge of discourse communities grew from the beginning. This section also holds my
ethnography which was one of the hardest types of writing I have ever experienced. There are a
lot of similarities between my literacy and discourse communities sections when it comes to
background of the artifacts I chose. The other two sections are pretty different from those two
sections though. The blog and in the moment sections had a variety of different things. Through
out my portfolio there are various types of writing that I obtained in this course. This course has
increased my depth on writing from writing journals, blog entries to narrative stories. The
challenges have made me a better writer and have made my skills more broad.

Sincerely,
Michaela White