About Me

My name is Yu Yamaguchi, a sophomore at Penn State Abington. I am doing a 2+2 program so I will be moving up to University Park for the next school year. I am majoring in Finance and I am planning to graduate in my junior year. I created this ePortofolio for my English 474 class with Dr. Naydan, where I am learning to be a writing fellow. I am an international student from Japan, but I was born in Norway and studied in England for about 6 years. When Many people supported me through middle school and high school in England because when I moved there, I did not speak English at all. Because of this experience, I am motivated to help other students who are seeking help, where I can give back to the community. Although this ePortofolio was made for my English course, it does not have a specific audience. In this ePortofolio, there are 10 blog posts and 4 major assignments, including 3 essays and a presentation.

The first assignment is titled “1,700 Miles of Text”, and is a personal narrative about my writing process. This essay was formatted to mimic phone texts to emphasize and engage in the topic of writing and friendship. The second assignment is titled “Different Audiences, Different Strategies“, and is a comparative analysis of two different essays. One is “Should Writers use they Own English?”, written by Vershawn Young, and the other is “Who Gains More Power in the EU After Brexit? *”, written by Agnieszka Szczypińska. In this essay, I focused on different techniques used in different writing fields. For example, I talk about the structure, use of parentheses, language, and use of charts and tables, and how they made the essays more reliable and impactful. The third assignment was an interview and researched reflection, titled “Interview with Dr. Horwitz”. During the interview, I asked about 7 questions and chose 5 to write the reflections. The questions I chose to include the following: how do you teach writing as a process in your course?, what genres of writing do your students learn to write in and how and why do you teach these genres?, what’s a successful moment you had as a writing teacher?, how does your social identity shape your teaching at a diverse institution like Penn State Abington?, and what is your main goal when teaching English 015? In this essay, I wrote a researched reflection, meaning that I made connections with the readings I have done in class to my opinions about Dr. Horwitz’s response. The last assignment is a Prezi presentation titled” Who am I and Who Will I be”. In this assignment, I created a Prezi about who I am as a person, as a future writing fellow, and how I can influence others as a writer.

Making my own ePortofolio was actually very fun and interesting. At some point, I was a little frustrated since I was overwhelmed by the fact that I had 10 different blog posts, 4 major assignments, and reading. However, by making the website, I was able to learn how to write blogs, how to write essays, and how to engage the audiences. Writing is an essential part of our lives as we always text, email, write reports, essays etc… Furthermore, technology development has led us to use more devices and different types of media to communicate. I believe that this ePortofolio is one of the most effective ways of communication as many people go on blogs and websites to search and learn new knowledge, topics, and skills.