Dear portfolio readers:

My name is Jeremy Souza and last year I finally came back to college after not wanting to continue after my first year. Once I passed English 091, English 101 introduced me to essay types that I was not familiar with such as, the memoir and the annotation essay. Working on these were challenging because having never done either of these two essay types before, I didn’t know where to begin. Essays I’ve done in the past have been about certain topics however, this year I’ve had the creative freedom to write about what I wanted. Last year, I feel that I fixed quite a few issues with my writing, with this semester, I was eager to put what I learned to the test. I hope you enjoy reading these essays.

My first submission is about persistence, which I called “Persistence Is The Key To Life”. As I began writing this essay, I had a clear Idea of how I was going to tackle this essay. First, I knew exactly how this essay was going to be structured. Secondly, persistence is about three things to me which are, motivation, positivity and failure. Motivation is a incredibly important trait to persistence. Motivation is a necessity, simply because if you’re going to be persistent, you need to have an end goal. For example, say I wanted to lift one hundred fifty pounds. Now I have motivation to get me to be persistent about my goal. I continued this pattern throughout my essay and feel that I made good points throughout it. Doing this essay was a challenging and rewarding to write.

My second submission was about a research topic, for this topic I picked “Should Immigrants Be Forced To Speak English When Moving Into the United States”. Now I picked this topic because, this to me, is truly controversial. Is it right or wrong to enforce a language on immigrants? The United States was founded by immigrants so it’s hard to say. When I wrote this essay, I was for enforcing a stricter requirement for immigrants to be able to legally move into the United States. However, I thought it was equally as important for Americans to learn a second language. Being bilingual is just too useful of a trait to not have on a local to global scale. I had fun writing and researching this essay and is by far the largest one I wrote this semester. Upon researching, I found some very interesting statistics that other might find interesting as well.

My last submission is about my memoir. This was the first essay I wrote in English 101 and I learned a ton from it. Before this class I had no idea what a memoir even was and now I have a much better understanding of it. I called this essay “Forced Persistence”. I went to Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School and that’s the event that I wrote my memoir about. It was about when Diman placed me into a shop I never even explored. This was during my eight weeks of exploring vocational shops the school offered. Not to mention, my attitude towards school at the time, which at this moment did a complete turn around for the better. Never doing this type of essay before, I went through a few rough drafts, not knowing the exact time frame when a memoir takes place.

I feel taking this course has properly prepared me for future types of writing. As mentioned above, I have never done these types of essays before and it was a challenge to complete them. Not to mention, some room to be creative for the topics, which is a very nice change of pace. The most challenging one I had to write, was definitely the memoir. I had no idea how specific it was to a moment in time. After taking English 101, I feel that I have learned quite a bit  from this class and eagerly want to learn more next semester.

I hope you enjoy reading my essays, as I found them enjoyable to write about.

Sincerely,

Jeremy Souza