To Whom It May Concern,
First of all, I want to thank you for taking your precious time to read my writing portfolio. I’m a student of Fudan University, major in social work.. This portfolio is an assignment of the course Academic English Writing, which is my English selective course.
The following five essays are my main work in the course, the order of which is under Mr. Corio’s instruction. I was an average English writer before taking the course. During this semester, Ron Corio, my teacher, gave me a lot of advice and writing strategies on essay writing, especially on critical writing. Those advices are about how to form your own thesis, how to start an essay, how to find evidence to suprport it and how to quote properly, which is of great importance to make my essay perfect. Thanks to Mr.Corio’s help, I will not be at a loss when writing an arguementative essay next time and I’m pretty sure that I can write better than before. Meanwhile, I learned the eleven critical element of a story, how to find the ideas the author wants to convey by analyzing these elements and how to read efficiently.
The first three essays, as you can see from the title, are the three-draft-writing, which is the largest project of this semester. These three essays are those which I put the most efforts into. It is a critical essay for the story “The Grass-Eaters”. In the essay, I blamed the Indian government for its incapablity. After I finished draft one, we had a peer-reviewing. My peer group pointed out some grammar mistakes and I rewrote the essay according to their suggestions. You can figure this out by comparing my first two drafts. Then I turned in my draft two. When I get my essay back, I was very much surprised, for Mr. Corio’s pointing out that there were more than a dozen mistakes in my draft. The biggest problem, as Mr. Corio pointed out, was that my idea was not well-supported. To solve the problem, I did a lot of research on the internet to find evidence, for little evidence exists in the story. If you compare my draft three with draft two, you can find that I used a lot of examples and statistics in my third draft. This is the result of doing online research..
The final-timed-writing is a writing test that we had in our computer lab. We had two more timed-writing before this one. The biggest challenge of timed-writing is to use the limited time properly. Fortunately, Mr. Corio gave us some strategies in the first two timed-writing. That is to write out the main idea of each paragraph first and to set aside about five to ten minutes to edit what I have written, which turned out to be very helpful. If I had not written out the main idea first, I might not be able to finish the writing in time.
The reading log is chosen from my four reading logs which I wrote in the beginning of this semester. The one that is presented to you is the one I consider the best. I didn’t change the writing much when posted it except for some grammar mistakes. The reading log is for the story “The Americanization of Shadrach Cohen”, which tells us how a Jew named Shadrach Cohen became Americanized without abandoning his original religious believes. The reading log mainly focus on how I feel after reading the story, not the story itself. I like the way I convey my idea, I hope you like it too.
Finally, I want to thank you again for reading my writing portfolio. I hope you can enjoy it.
Yours faithfully,
Jennifer Cheng
