Cover letter

Jordan Lawson
English 033
Randall Martoccia
30 November 2013
Dear Portfolio Reviewer, This paper is a reflection of how I feel I improved in my writing abilities. Overall, I feel as though I improved on grammatical issues and giving explanations to topics I referred to. My analysis of my improvements will be based off of previous papers throughout the first semester English class until now. This portfolio will include four different styles of writing: a narrative, a newspaper article, an analysis, and a research. The first paper I choose to discuss is my narrative, which was the first paper I wrote in college. I felt like this paper was going to be an easy task because I have written one before. I chose a topic that I knew I had allot to say about. In this paper, I expected to have multiple grammatical errors but I did not. I did not have a thesis for this paper because I felt one was not needed. Even in a revision of this paper I would have not added one. I chose not to revise this paper because I didn’t feel any revision was needed. I now realize that I could have revised it to get an A instead of a B+. To improve this paper I could have used more detail in describing certain scenery and certain emotions that I had in certain scenes of the story. I also could have added in more events to make the narrative flow together better. The second paper I wrote was an analysis paper. This paper I found to be extremely difficult. Sticking to the thesis I found to the most difficult part. I now feel as though my thesis was not specific enough. I found myself to struggle with coming up with new topics in each paragraph. The story I chose was not a good one to develop a well written paper. In order to develop a well written paper off of my thesis, I had to evaluate different questions that my thesis brought to mind. Even then, topics were hard to stick with because they were too closely related to each other. In this paper I did have many grammatical errors but this did not surprise me because that’s what I seem to struggle with the most. On the return of my paper, it was brought to my attention that I did not write the paper based on my audience. The audience I was supposed to write to had already read the book but I used too much summary instead of just strictly analyzing the events. I did not have good transitions in this paper either. The paragraphs in my eyes did not flow well together. My strengths of this paper was that I came up with good idea topics to write about despite my difficultly coming up with the actual topics. The third paper I choose to discuss is the newspaper article. I knew this was going to be a difficult paper for me to write considering I had never before written in this style nor did I pay much attention to how newspaper articles were written. When presented with the assignment, I went in with the mindset that in would be able to flow easily as I started writing with given information from the interviewees. However, I did not ask the right questions or thoroughly prepare for the final product. The subject was on an organization called Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Student Union or GLBTSU for short. This was my weakest paper I believe because I was unaware of how the paper should be written or the information it should include. For example, before my revision, I refrained from asking how many people are in the club currently or how the people in the group view the tolerance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people on campus. In my revision, I went back and asked more questions to one of the people I had previously interviewed. I had few grammatical errors in this paper which did surprise me. What I could have done better was take more time to outline how I would put the paper together. I did not find I had any strengths in this paper. The final paper that I wrote was a research paper. I thought that this would be a fairly easy paper to write but I was wrong. This paper had to be stemmed from a previous paper that we had already written. I found that picking a topic was difficult because I did not write papers that were good topics for research. I then decided to use a deeper topic of coping from my narrative paper which was about the death of my granddaddy. When I developed a thesis and an outline, I began to ease through the research part. I did not use an academic database for my research because my topic was too broad and none of the articles or books were specific to my topic. I did use legitimate sources from .org and .gov websites. Incorporating citations has always been difficult for me because I am use to turning what someone else says into my own words. I then found out that using some one else’s idea is also plagiarism. I do not believe I have plagiarized however. Creating a work cited page was also difficult because I did not, even after asking for clarification, understand how to cite the sources I used causing me to use the minimum number of sources. I did keep in mind the audience I was writing to. After writing all of these papers, I do think that I have learned to better clarify the topics I write about. I have also learned how to make a well-developed outline, however, following my outlines are difficult for me because I tend to ramble. I did use the correct format in each paper that I wrote. This cover letter was hard for me to develop because I have never had to evaluate the writings that I have done. My greatest weakness in writing this cover letter was picking what I wanted to evaluate out of each of the papers I have written. Overall my main weakness is still grammatical errors. On a scale from what I need to work on the most to the least is: critical engagement with evidence, expression, purpose and audience, formatting and citation, and thesis and development.