Cover Letter

June 17, 2007                                                                   

Ron Corio
Portfolio Committee
English Department
Fudan University

Dear Portfolio Reader:

I would be truly grateful to you for your taking time to read my selected works for my portfolio. In this portfolio, five pieces of my assignments in the Academic Writing Class are included in order to show the footprint of my improving writing skills, as well as the insight to reality and thoughts about life. In this semester, by reading The International Story, an anthology with guidelines for reading and writing about fiction written by Ruth Spack, I witnessed how personality decides on the fate of those small tomatoes and how changeable life is. It offers me a lot of food to think about. The sequence of the essays listed in my portfolio, from bottom to top, shows the progress I have made through my efforts, peer’s encouragement and teacher’s advice.

When it came to writing before I attend the Academic Writing Class, I would just frown at the odd topic and then rack my own brain, only to put down several sentences. Though I spared no efforts in writing an essay, the coming-outs seemed not satisfactory. Attending to the class of the Academic Writing Class, our teacher Mr. Ron Corio eliminated my fear of writing by an unusual method, which called free-writing. Whatever comes into our mind is not restricted to show up on the paper. Original thoughts and feelings are encouraged to express in your writing. When smoothly writing a passage, you can even neglect the spelling and grammar mistakes. This method effectively stimulates my interest. Writing is thus enjoyable. The first item, the reading log “Necklace”, which selected from the four reading logs I have written, is my true feeling to the main character Mathilde. I believe only true feelings from the bottom of the heart can move your audience just like the drama.

Timed-writing demands not only the emotion, but also a sharp insight into the reality and an ability to relate it to the story. Timed-writing trains our speed and logical thoughts. “What might have been the quality of Mme. Loisel’s life if she had not lost the necklace? Is her life better or worse now?” Owing to the impulse to write, the time of conceiving of the frame is shorter and shorter. From timed-writing, I have improved my quick response and writing speed as the length of the essay has increased gradually from the timed-writing one to three.

The impulse to writing still is the source of inspiration. “Shock” is the only concise word I can choose to describe my feelings after reading the story of “Dead Men’s Path”. So I chose it as the story to analyze and interpret in my essay. The main character, Michael Obi, a young headmaster who had zeal to change the backward of the Ndume Central School, closed a “dead men’s path” of the tribal people without taking counsel with them, which lead to the destruction of the school compound and his failure in the report of the supervisor. The ending reminds me of the importance of a step-by-step, programmatic approach to problem solving. It is also a necessary element in improving writing skills.

Draft one in my portfolio was chosen because I quoted too much and wrote too little. The quotation marks spring up in the body of the draft one, which continually interrupts the outline of the essay. Too many quotations indeed set obstacles to readers. My teacher, Mr. Corio advised us to use quotations where are fundamentally needed. Too many quotations, which are not incorporated into the sentences, will deprive the essay of smoothness and fluentness. He put emphasis on writing my own feeling and interpretations of the essay, not the quotations. Paraphrasing, which he proposed us to use, can take the place of the long-sentence quotation, which I have revised in my draft two.

In the draft two, besides deleting many quotations, determining one thesis statement and clearly stated maybe the most important target in my writing. I tried to seek more specific evidence for supporting my thesis statement. The analysis of the character’s wife was not sufficient to interpret Obi’s inflexibility, so I deleted the whole paragraph. And paraphrasing is frequently employed in draft two when compared with draft one. In this draft, I also revised many grammatical errors, such as fragment, verb form error and so on. However, you can find that the body does not have a focus. I made the whole essay just an extended summary and did not relate to the thesis.

In order to overcome these shortcomings, I began to add more analysis and relate it to the thesis. The proportion of my own words has increased. Relating to the stories, I must have a clear mind of the exact meaning I want to convey through the paragraph. I revised the logic of interpretation in my draft three. Moreover, I have to mention the importance of listing sources. My teacher, Mr. Corio, lay stress on the obligation to cite the source of the material you quoted. Otherwise, you will be criticized, even charged with plagiarizing others’ work. I learned that honest and serious attitude toward writing are vital to us.

Thank you for taking the time to read my papers. I hope you enjoyed reading each one and that you learned from my ideas.

Sincerely,
Cecilia Xie

27.5.07 15:45