Letter of Reflection

My portfolio shows the progress I have made from the beginning when I handed in my first writing piece. I feel I have put more effort in improving my diction and using more creative styles of writing. For instance, instead of using the word nice, I would use cordial and I would put certain words in brackets at the end of a line to make my writing more catchy. Reading through my pieces, I have discovered that my favorite pieces are the ones when I write about my own experiences and when I put down on paper my own thoughts and feelings. I've developed skills that have shown through while writing poetry, when I was told to write poetry I thought all my lines had to rhyme. Now I've realized the best kind of poetry are the pieces that don't reveal the main idea of the poem, therefore the ones that are hard to figure out. I still need to work on reading and revising my work. I put commas in places where they are not needed, and break up lines where I should keep as one line.
I feel that my best writing piece was when I wrote a long poem about the stages of life. I watched a short video on the growth of a flower which I related to the stages of life. I wrote how each stage of life relates to us entering a new side of the world. The beginning of the poem started off as a new born child and what their part is in the big world. Next, I went onto describing what kind of rules a young girl or boy has to follow and what they experience in the early stages of life. Then I described how teenagers see a different side of the world, and develop independence while in college. After the college life, there's marriage and parenting. During the stage of marriage and parenting, I wrote about the feeling of settling with your family and your role as a parent. I describe the stage of being a grandmother as being a seeker and getting taken care of. I ended the poem with death, which resembled a flower that is peddle-less. At first I was just going to simply write about growth but I came to really enjoy how I wrote about the stages of life in dept. While I was writing this I learned to look further than my own prediction of what I would feel at each stage of life. Instead I would put myself in other peoples shoes or ask what they thought about that time period of their life. As a writer, I was trying to convey to the readers messages about life and how to not look at life as a whole but as different parts that you will experience. This piece shows that I have an understanding of what life has to offer. I feel that this is one of my best pieces because I feel I have a connection to my readers because most people will experience these stages of life.
The goals I set for myself at the beginning of this course was to be open to criticism that might be thrown at my pieces of writing and I told myself to take time from each day to be creative or to write about something that was on my mind. I feel I accomplished my goals pretty well. When I received criticism it only encouraged myself to pay more attention to those errors. The goal I set for writing a little everyday, I feel I accomplished because any time I had time to write I took that opportunity. My goals for the future are to continue to use writing to relief certain emotions or reveal exciting thoughts. Also to continue to learn how to use more creative styles of writing because they only have a positive impact on my writing.
The difference between when I wrote my first piece of writing and my last piece of writing is that I started to write more about my own experiences. My more recent pieces have been longer, my diction has improved and I've seen improvement in the way I end my poems. My endings seem to be getting stronger and I feel satisfied when I've finished reading my poems.