Assignment/Activity TitleFeminism Essay Year FreshmanSkillWriting, Research, AnalysisPortfolio Category Critical Reasoning

I chose to do the feminism essay for this portfolio coversheet because I really enjoyed the assignment. Writing is something I enjoy doing and I often receive good grades on my writing so I think of it as my strong suit. Most of the writing I do for school is of the persuasive kind, essays that are about convincing someone of a certain point or analyzing text. The feminism essay was fun because it was not any of that; it was my opinion. I was given a question to answer and several bullet points of information that I had to include in my essay. I was able to format my own opinion and present it in the way I wanted to. This was very freeing and not something that I am able to do often. It is also a unique piece for my portfolio in that, while I do have other pieces of my opinion in my portfolio, none of them are essays that were a substantial part of my grade. It is also important to include the feminism essay in my portfolio because it is the first thing I have placed in the Critical Reasoning category this year. Starting that portfolio category with this piece creates a new foundation for the future works I will place in this category because my views may change later on. While I am confident that the majority of my views will not change, my reaction and answer to the central question of the essay may be altered with time and it will be interesting to be able to look back at this essay and see how I thought in ninth grade. It is also critical to have diversity in my portfolio. As I have already mentioned, this is the first writing piece that states my personal opinion; it is also the first piece I have placed in my portfolio that addresses feminism. If I were to put a different project in my portfolio, such as fourth quarter Interdisciplinary, my portfolio would not have as wide a range of topics and would not be as interesting. I am unsure of how others will react to my essay. It is not as though I wrote extremely controversial things in my essay, although some people may consider the topic of the essay itself to be controversial. I consider myself a feminist because I believe in equal rights but there are some people who do not. If they were to read my essay, they might get offended by the content or perhaps disagree with me. More reasonable people may agree with me or I may be able to debate certain points of my essay with others which could be beneficial. In the end, I believe most people would agree with my main statement, mostly because I have spoken with many of my classmates about their opinions on the essay and the essay questions and most of them seemed to share the same views as me. This essay relates to my future in that one of the bullet points was about how much equality women have achieved so far and I wrote about the wage gap and sex discrimination. When I enter the working world, I will experience these issues firsthand and I will have to deal with them on a daily basis. By being informed about these issues, I can better prepare myself for dealing with them and maybe changing them. If I decide to go into politics, I already have a basis for a platform on ending sex discrimination in the workforce or closing the wage gap. With this essay, I became better informed about the problems women face in the world and I became better equipped for arguing about the importance of fixing these problems.

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