Portfolio Reflective Cover Letter

UWP 1 has been a creative journey for me. Before this class, I had only
taken one writing course here at UC Davis and that was my first year.
Im now a junior and expected to have more troubles writing a formal
paper again. Just like any other class, my fulfillment of the class usually
depended on the professor. I was especially frustrated in workload
English because my friends has a better teacher than me, making it
much more dreadful that I was stuck with an awful professor. However,
UWP 1 has been very enjoyable. Reasons behind this will be talked
about in much detail later on.

Overall, UWP has helped me have a different outlook on the subject.

This class gave me so much freedom and creativity that it made it
easier to write because it was about something that interested me
instead of a prompt about an irrelevant topic. Drafting has been a focal
point in my writing. It is the most procrastinated part of writing. Ive
learned that instead of dreading it to the extreme, writing rough drafts
without the worry of quality decreases the anxiety of writing. I am a
visual person, so it helped me see my own thoughts on paper no
matter how unorganized they were. I learned that writing your very
first draft is more on getting your ideas on paper. By having it on
paper, you see where your paper has strengths and obviously its
weaknesses. Most importantly, throughout this class when you write
out your ideas you read it over, you find loopholes in your writing
where you dont necessarily have conclusive evidence or analysis. This
exact situation occurred when I was writing my literacy analysis essay.

In my literacy essay, I wrote about my lack of speech at a young age.

When I wrote my first and second drafts, I stated how I had these
problems but I forgot to mention how it related to my reasoning behind
why I never enjoyed reading and writing. After revising the drafts, I
found that I had never stated why I was like this. I explained what I did,
but it didnt include the background knowledge. I went back and
included my parents lack of reading and writing, saying that my father
couldnt read or write fluently until college and that my mother was the
offspring of immigrant parents with English as their second language.
This example of just putting words on paper will be your insight, in my
case to missing information. The beauty of this mechanism is it can
work for many different cases from grammar to citation insertion.
Thinking of your overall paper as a house with you ideas as building
blocks, you can arrange each block in a specific place that best fits to
make a well-structured essay. I decided to not use my literacy essay in
my portfolio because I wanted a wider variety of mode and tone.
On the other hand, I will be including my college literacy essay in the
portfolio. What I learned from this portion of the class was that reading
an essay and hearing an essay will have different tones. I know this
because my college literacy essay is in an audio format. Initially, I
planned to freely speak my idea by just following bullet points. I was
taught that when I do this, the formality of the essay is decreased
dramatically. It was very difficult to speak each sentence formally
without needing to pause to add crutch words, which are words that let
our thoughts catch up such as so. What I learned is that this can be
used as a form of a rough draft. I then used that and revised each
sentence to have a better sentence structure. This mainly helped with
making a bridge between an essays formal tone and an instructive
audio with some casual tone. It also helped because when I type, I tend
to type slower than my thoughts. By saying my ideas, it helped add
length to my writing by saying every idea that came to mind. After I
had written out my initial audio, I recorded it again using the revised
script. This eliminated all the crutch word usage in my audio along with
some editing of the audio file.

The final project was the discourse community project. This gave me
the most information on how to research. It helped me pertain online
resources that dont obtain any bias. I learned how to tell the
difference between a trusted source and one without credibility.
Research is very broad, so workshops helped me get more specific with
interview questions, website searches and analysis. I decided to keep
my discourse community project in an essay format because I was
struggling with visuals for a PowerPoint. It was also easier to describe
the six characteristics of swales in paragraphs instead of slides. The
information was too dense to fit into one slide. It was about formatting
my project to match my tone not the other way around. In addition,
thats what this class has taught me, to go with what feels will fit the
best.

This class has benefited me in more than just writing. I can apply these
teachings of research and drafting to my future career. Because
biochemistry is a much-researched based industry, my findings in this
course will go hand in hand with how to research articles. I wouldnt
have thought an introductory writing class would help me in more
places than just writing. You allowed us so much flexibility with our
writing; it made me enjoy the subject more than I did before this class.
Im thankful that I was assigned a good teacher that made me enjoy
writing and showed me that writing doesnt always have to be one
mode. This class will propel me through my undergraduate, a thesis
paper if I ever decide to earn a masters, and my future endeavors.