Martine M. Parisien
Dear portfolio readers
My beginnings at Bristol Community College (BCC) were not easy, especially because of the reading and writing classes. I was faced with a lot of problems because people would speak very quickly for me. They had to repeat everything twice so that I could catch the idea. My problem with the pronunciation was really a big challenge. When I talk to a person, it was difficult for that person to understand what I say. Sometimes, it made me feel sad. Often times, I felt lost in some courses such as reading and writing. However, things were going was better with the writing class thanks to the help of my professors and their encouragement. When I am discouraged, they encourage me to continue reading in order to write better. To me, the argumentative essay was the most difficult one. It took me hours to get my ideas organized. With the application of all the advice from my professors, I think that my writing has improved because after taking advanced writing, I registered for English 101.
The first assignment is about an essay. As regards this essay, I wrote about a part of my life. Initially, I had some difficulties finding a topic. But, finally, I said to myself: talking about self must be easier. I wrote about the most tragic period of my life. I was diagnosed with brain cancer during my adolescence. There are no sophisticated equipments to treat my complicated medical conditions in my country, Haiti. Finally, we found a doctor who lived in the U.S. and then decided to return to Haiti to establish his private practice. At first glance, he asked an excessive amount of money for treatment. But thanks to our intense prayer, we almost had nothing to pay for treatment. At the end, after one and a half years of treatment, my brain was tumor-free and the headaches were Gone. When I began to write the essay, the ideas came up easily as if I was going through that experience again. The organization of the sequences was not easy for me. Finally, with the help of my teacher, I ended up classifying different sequences.
The second assignment is about ethnography. I spent hours and days to write this essay. I had had some difficulties deciding whether I could establish some comparisons and contrasts, but my professor guided me through it brilliantly. It was very challenging for me. My professor gave me the option to write about any topic that connects to our theme. As my theme was centered on family and relationship, I had to go to a place where I could make my own observations. One day, I happened to hear a group of four fellow Christians of my color say that African Americans are more spiritual and more worthy of God’s blessings than White people. Afterwards, I decided to think it through and examine the spiritual focus of those brothers and sisters by observing that church whose Senior Pastor is my husband’s best friend for three months. At last, that has helped me develop my observation skills and gave me the opportunity to ponder over certain ethnic groups, trends, and other behaviors.
My last assignment is an argument essay. I spent hours reading over and over this 15-page article based upon relationship and its title is faux friendship. The text has very complicated grammatical structures, which made the task very difficult for me. After doing the summary, I gave my opinion on faux friendship. And then I looked up another less orthodox point of view than that expressed by William Deresiewicz, the author of “faux friendship”. Fortunately, I came across a comprehensive article written by Frédéric Joignot, the writer of Le Monde (The World). The focus of the latter in his article helped me put everything in perspective and caused me to embrace the potential and the upside of relationships or friendship cultivated on the social networks.
Finally, this class has helped me organize better my thoughts, develop my sense of observation and allow me to improve my writings.
I sincerely hope that you enjoy reading these works as much as I have enjoy writing and developing my ideas.