Dear Mr.

C,

Not too long ago, I began the long winding road of my college career. Feels like it was

just yesterday I was starting college and moving all my stuff into my dorm. And here we are now

at the end of the semester. Time has wings. You know, even when you realize you need to

appreciate the time, in the moment, it still goes by fast. This ePortfolio I have created which is

the basis of my whole website. Its a layout of everything I have learned and reflected upon in

my UWRT 1104 class here at UNC Charlotte. I have named this ePortfolio Tyler Versus

Scams because it represents what I stand for this topic and no longer want to see this happen to

defenseless citizens. Technology is shaping our everyday lives and we dont even realize it.

Especially in the way we write, online typewriters, blogs, newspapers. We now can express our

thoughts and feeling on paper, but now electronically. This class has shown how far Ive come

as a writer, analytical thinker, and programmer. My Dear Malcolm Letter that was the first

section of my ePortfolio shows you who I am as a person and what my concerns were about this

class. Having said that, I can now show you my growth as a writer and feel proud of my

development.

This semester took me outside of my comfort zone in many ways, but they all helped me

become a better writer and reflector. I wasnt sure if I would enjoy having to write a blog every

week, but as the semester went on I found myself enjoying writing freely. My blog made more

capable of expressing my thoughts and opinions down on paper to each prompt. I feel like that

this was one of the biggest helps to the development of my writing. My favorite blog prompts

you gave us were always the Ted Talks. The reason that is because each one always related to

everyday life and made you think about yourself. For example on of the blog posts was in fact a
Ted talk on How to buy happiness. I came up with a reflection that buying a gift for someone

will make you happier, than buying something for yourself. You will in fact feel no different

when buying something for yourself, but will feel good about yourself when getting a gift for

someone else. Another blog post I could touch on would be also a Ted Talk on Why 30 is not

the new 20. This post was a fun one for me because it allowed me to branch out and talk about

how we all need to stay young for as long as we can. Whether we are 30 years old or 20 years

old, dont consider yourself as old because as far as some older folk are concerned you still have

a long time to youre old. So, enjoy it, get out there and explore the world. These blog

assignments without a doubt have been my most memorable and favorite part of the class. I hope

for you to learn and gain knowledge from my blog site, along with some enjoyment.

Coming into this course, I never found pleasure in english and especially when it comes

to writing. I believe I felt this way was because, in high school the teachers put so many

limitations and restrictions on your paper. They laid out for you the dos and don'ts of writing a

paper. Mr. C however, he was a completely different teacher and had a different philosophy and

persona on writing. He has allowed me to write freely and think reflectively through my own

thoughts. That definitely has made it easier on me and made me begin to love writing. When I

wrote back in high school, I would never go back and proofread my work and that was a major

mistake on my part and my teachers. Never in a million years would I have ever thought

reflection would be the answer to writing a strongly structured paper. Just in this semester itself,

I have done more reflective thinking than I have throughout K-12th grade. I think that is a good

and bad thing because it was better to start now in college then never. The reflections have really

read through my work more carefully and thoroughly. The Studio assignments were definitely

one of the biggest examples of reflective thinking. They constantly brought you back to the idea
of how you think your work is going with your topic and what knowledge are you gaining from

the research process. Then finally, the Extended Inquiry Project you didnt have a choice but to

use the reflection way of thinking to feel happy with your paper. Reflective thinking has

definitely helped me throughout the whole semester and I will continue to use it in my everyday

life.

An aspect of the class I never really looked forward to was the free writing portion. I was

always just concerned on what the prompt was going to be. Having an 8am class I sometimes

came in extremely tired. So the thought of not writing enough or just not knowing what to write

about was definitely a fear. The short amount of time to compile your thoughts together that

early in the morning was also a struggle. In the beginning my free write entries were not very

thorough and lacked detail. As time progressed, I began to see significant improvement in my

entries. You will see these entries in the second page of my ePortfolio, that they are detailed and

well thought out. I began to learn to use free writing to my advantage. It became almost a

learning experience, in a sense that I wouldnt have to make this mistake in an actual paper to be

turned in . A free write I enjoyed was ...seize this very minute. What you can do or dream you

can do, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. This was a fun one for me and I

explain why in my reflection on the free write page. Certain prompts made me think analytically,

reflectively and others creatively. But most of these prompts made me become a questioner, to

figure out more information upon my topic. Each of these helped in a different aspect in my

writing. The experience of free writing was an intriguing and intelligent approach to fix and

develop better writing habits.

Now getting into the aspects of my ePortfolio, let's start off with the Studio assignments.

This section of the class I didnt feel was going to help me and was going to be a general waste
of time. At the time I thought we were putting way too much time into something that didnt

really matter, especially with the first studio. The only thing that was driving me to do this

assignments was knowing that it would be an easy A for a first assignment. What I didnt realize

was that these studios would change the way I wrote the rest of the semester. Its unfortunate

that these assignments werent appreciated more in the beginning, but Im glad I finally realized

that the studios were like the cheat code to developing my writing. For example, I remember

thinking over and over again that the research process is never ending and will not be done to the

final draft of the EIP. This was something I hadnt thought about before and it made me do a full

180 and helped me gain so much more knowledge upon my topic.

The first part of my EIP was creating a well worded Topic Proposal. I was excited when

Mr. C approved my project because I really wanted to learn more upon scamming since

computer science is my major. I wanted to become more informed, but now that I had resources

and gained the knowledge, I wanted to use my information to raise awareness about online

scamming.However, I would've never guessed I would gain more knowledge from my peers

upon my topic. It was amazing to chat with my peers about their topics while ultimately having

the opportunity to share information about my topic. I did not find that this aspect of the EIP was

any harder than the research about preventions of e-crime that I was researching on my own. The

best part about it was, I was able to finish this project quickly and efficiently.

The next step of the EIP was to create an annotated bibliography. I will admit that this

part of the project was not something that I found easy. I didnt have a good sense of which

sources I wanted to use, so the process was a little longer than expected. It was a very tedious

and repetitive process, but my strong knowledge in the topic already had allowed me to know

which articles needed to be read. I felt as if there was little freedom in an annotated bibliography,
but I completed it with detailed explanations. I believe this part of the EIP really made me

become a better analytical thinker and worked on my time management skills.. In the end, I

completed this portion of the project and was proud of my work.

When writing my first draft for my EIP, I felt very overwhelmed and frustrated. I was

thinking along the lines of weve already written a Topic Proposal and Annotated Bibliography,

what could possibly be going into this final paper. Again, I must emphasize that the passion that

I have for my topic, just makes me want to go out and tell the world. I was extremely happy with

my final product and believed that Mr. C would agree with my thoughts on it. I knew that my

paper had plenty of room for improvement, but was just focusing on the comments I would

receive back. As compared to papers in high school, this was by far the best paper Ive written in

my career as a student.

In making revisions and creating the final draft of my EIP, I made very significant

changes. I rewrote my introduction as well as my conclusion. After rewriting those, it without a

doubt made my paper sound better. I fixed a few grammatical and structural errors. The big

changes though were my additions of information. I added were more background history,

causes and effects of e-crime, and lastly online dating scams. I felt as if my paper was well

worded and made sense. I felt that it was factual, useful, and had a concerning draw to it. I

believed that it encircled the best information I could offer as a first semester freshman. In the

end, I was glad to have the project finished. I was very glad to stop reflecting upon scam artists

thinking styles and online scams. I was excited to have completed the finished product and

feeling like there was no more information I could put into the paper.

Now that the ePortfolio is over, I sit here writing this paragraph with flashbacks of

walking into the first days of class. Its amazing how fast this semester has gone by. This goes
without saying, as with everything, the ePortfolio was not as much work when sitting down and

grinding it out. Though it took up a lot of free time, the ePortfolio allowed me to reflect upon all

of my work and see how far Ive come as a writer. I realized in the end, that I had elevated my

writing game. I had become more knowledgeable in my thinking aspects and feel more

intelligent as a computer scientist.

As I end this paper, I would just like to say thank you Mr. C. Thank you for all the the

jokes you cracked and all the knowledge you packed. Your class alone was the highlight of my

first semester at UNCC and college as well. For that Im grateful because I have never enjoyed

writing classes. Ive always been a big math guy. I can now say I am both. I think I can speak for

all of the students in our class to say these words one more time thank you.

So long partner,

Tyler High