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Cover Letter:

Dear Valentina,

Throughout this course I have learned so much regarding my writing abilities and my writing

potential. I learned many useful techniques and strategies for my writing especially with getting

started on writing something. Through the Project Builders I learned how to outline an essay and

prepare for writing an essay. These were such valuable things to experience because now I feel

way more confident preparing for an essay and gathering my ideas and evidence so I can use

them in my writing. Revising was another aspect of this class that I really enjoyed because I’ve

never really revised much in my highschool writing class. This allowed me to look back at my

essays and criticize myself in order to become a stronger writer. Revising helped me realize

what I am good at and what I need to work on.

Revising the Writing Projects really helped my overall portfolio because I was able to

receive feedback from you, the professor and my classmates. In Writing Project 1 it was my first

time looking at genre conventions of other articles and making them into my own. Originally in

the first writing project I talked too much about the article's content and not so much about why

and how the author said what he did in the article. As I went through my first draft I realized that

I needed to make changes on that issue, which I did. I deleted a couple paragraphs in the

beginning where I explained the content and talked more about the genre conventions. Noticing

this flaw in my writing really gave me motivation to change my writing into what it originally

should have been. I think this mistake came from the fact that I didn’t fully understand the

prompt but on the second look I was able to really get in deep and make it right. Another thing I
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struggled with was my organization. I had really long paragraphs with a bunch of different ideas

so I gathered my ideas into their own paragraphs to make the essay easier to read and to follow.

In my Writing Project 2 essay I felt that I understood the prompt a lot more and was able to write

accordingly. I used the same article that I did in the first project so I already had the

understanding of the genre conventions the author used which helped me already have those in

my mind. Similar to the first project, my problem in the second project was my organization. I

keep struggling with the organization of my paragraphs based on the content. When revising, I

looked into my paragraphs and what they were talking about so I could group them together.

Even with just adding a paragraph it made my article so much easier to read and understand. I

also added a couple sentences that summarized the paragraph which really helped add more

clarification to the writing.

My final portfolio reflects on what I learned because you can see the changes I made

through track changes and how it made my writing better. This is large in part to the fact that I

took my criticism and changed my essays accordingly. The final portfolio shows my original

writings and compares them to the revised ones which allows you to see how I have grown as a

writer. I am a big believer that positive feedback helps the writer notice what they did well so

they don’t start to change the writing too much. I used the positive feedback to build around the

things I did well. For instance I felt my intro in Writing Project 2 captured the ideas very clearly

so continued with that writing style of examining the articles. Throughout this course we were

introduced to many different styles and types of writing. I really enjoyed projects where we had

to translate genres because it gave me a chance to get creative with my writing and write about

things I am interested in. Although it was a challenge to translate an academic article to a

nonacademic essay, it was a great learning experience and ultimately made me a better writer.
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With all of the things I learned in writing 2 I think that moving on to other writing classes

will be very enjoyable for me because I feel I am a stronger writer. This class has really opened

my eyes to different types of writing and how to begin writing something. My interest in writing

has definitely increased because of this course and its content. In high school I always liked

english class and the writing that came with it because of how it allows you to be creative. I also

learned a lot about revision and how revising my papers allowed me to see things I did well and

also maybe didn’t do well. For my future writing courses and experiences I will take what I

learned from writing 2, especially the revision aspect so that I can excel.

Sincerely,

Trevor Ricci