The first half of the composition course was marginally successful in my opinion. There, I determined where my prose was weakest and how I could improve it. The topics in this course were also easier to cover, because the style of the paper was the only attribute locked down. Therefore, entering the second half of the course concerned me, as I now had to write about literature that had perhaps an infinite number of ways to interpret. Literary analysis is something I am acutely aware of and is one of my weak points. But I thought I had improved considerably in this area, as the first two articles show. The main reason why I chose short story analysis and poetry explanation is that they are the two highest levels. These articles also contain my best thinking, which becomes part of the loose theme of my portfolio: analysis. The first article was difficult for me to write, as it required several proofreads and a significant amount of notes. Of course, I was wrong about the initial theme of the article. The articles I reviewed on the same story from my peers focused on “survival of the fittest,” which I did not take into account. Fortunately, my notes provided enough of a foundation that my chosen thesis on “educational assimilation” could be viable, even if broad. One way I made argument easier was to mark quotes on the story pages, a tip I found in the class text Making Literature Matter. I went further in the pre-writing: each quote I marked was accompanied by my thoughts. This was helpful because I was able to organize my thoughts in one place and, in my opinion, my final version of the paper is essentially a cleaned-up version of the pre-writing. For example, on the mark marked 230, I stated that "the teaching materials are often rigid and balanced, and they leave very little room for creativity." This has become a central part of my argument for this article, in which I compare