The ten weeks that comprised this quarter, were a gauntlet of sorts, which developed a tremendous amount of insight into the themes of the quarter, as well as coming to an understanding of what it takes to write a strong, thesis-driven essay. For the writer’s choice portion of my e-portfolio, I have chosen the final essay that I wrote about the traditional wedding ceremony, because I think it is my strongest paper, and reflective of the growth that I had over the course of the quarter. The prompt for the essay was to select a specific cultural tradition that has been challenged, altered, or undermined, analyze those changes, and derive some conclusions about the impacts on society as a whole. The kicker was that we had to include an antithesis in our paper yet derive some kind of concrete conclusion. After two papers that did a great deal of dancing around the subject and being very vague, I was able to really focus this one about my thesis. It took a bit of work to get there and some prodding from my classmates and instructors, but I finally got there. It was a paper that was a bit of a revelation as I had originally started with a very broad topic in marriage, narrowed it down to weddings, and narrowed even farther to focus on the changes that have occurred since the fifties. My favorite parts of this essay are the references to the fifties like, “the days of Ward and June Cleaver” and “Eisenhower era”, which was a an effort to rid my paper of broad time frames, and keep it focused on a specific era, without constantly referring to “the fifties”. These changes reflect a shift in my writing, which helped to strengthen my grade and produce an essay that I am proud to be the author of.
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