Cover Letter

To Whom It May Concern:

I am currently a junior student of Mathematics from Fudan University, and I took this course of Academic Writing so as to improve my English writing ability, the weakest link of my English. This semester of writing class mainly focused on the analysis and interpretation of the four short stories we read. This is what my writing portfolio revolves around. I have enclosed three drafts of my essay on the story The Necklace, one final timed-writing and one reading log on another story named The Grass-Eaters. Besides the portfolio entries presented here, we have also accomplished another several reading logs on the stories and another two timed-writings.

This semester of writing class was never an easy one, but it also helped me grow as a writer a lot. The first and probably the most important concept of writing that our instructor Ron has introduced to us is writing in drafts. Before this semester, my writings were all one-draft ones and I just had little chance going back to rethink and revise my papers. This new idea of writing in drafts has opened up a new horizon of writing for me and I am totally fascinated by the improvements I have made during continual editing and revising. Through these three drafts and the help from the teacher and the peer classmates, I have been able to compose a final essay that I myself am satisfied with. With Ron’s instruction and help, I have developed a stronger, clearer and better thesis statement than I first did, which is a good start for my whole essay. One major problem of my first two drafts is the organization and structure which makes the supporting evidence and ideas unclear. From comments on my paper and in-class peer review, I made big changes on my third draft and got better feedbacks. In addition, I have been able to get improvements on other facets of my writing such as introducing and interpreting quotations, grammatical errors, formats, and tones. On the whole, I believe I am becoming a better writer in English as I had expected to gain in this class.

On the top of the list are the three drafts of my essay, which are the key part of this writing portfolio. As I have mentioned above, writing these drafts was a process of discovery, a zigzag journey. Teachers and students commented that they had trouble seeing a strong connection between my supporting paragraphs and the thesis statement in my first two drafts, and I found out that was because although the organization and structure was friendly for my own mind, the flow of ideas and logic were vague and unclear to other readers. Then I decided to totally change the outline of my essay. In draft three, I turned my supporting evidences into four paragraphs of comparisons, which better justified themselves in proving the thesis. After that, I was surprised to see that the revised outline was much clearer and understandable, even for my own reading.

Under those entries, I have included the final timed-writing that we finished in class at the end of this semester. It was done with the given 45 minutes and of course had many errors since I had little time to edit. Still, you can see the structure and focus on the main ideas.

The final entry is the reading log on the story The Grass-Eaters, written after I read the story. I have kept the reading log the way it was. It showed my immediate feelings and thought after reading The Grass-Eaters, and through exchanging ideas and commenting on the internet, I got better and deeper understanding of the story.

Thank you for taking your precious time to read my writings, and I hope you enjoyed them.

Sincerely,
Jason Wu

30.5.07 17:47