Cover Letter
To Whom It May Concern:
I am very glad that you enter my blog and read my writing portfolio. I am a junior in Fudan University and major in Computer Science. Thank you for reading my blog first. I take English as my second language and entered Advanced Academic Writing this semester, taught by Mr. Ron. After learning from the course, I improved my English a lot since the course trained us a lot.
In most classes, we always take the first five minutes to write freely. We are given a title and can write every thing we think of without caring grammar and spelling mistakes. We write continually and what we want is just to write out what occurs to us. It attempts to let us master the ability that things can come to mind continually. This can improve our English level.
I read four funny stories from <International Story>. For every story I should write a read log and reply two to others’ read log. The four stories I read are very interesting. The first story is The Necklace, written by Gue de Maupassant. It tells a story about a poor woman Mme. Loisel lost the necklace borrowed from her friend and worked hard for ten years to pay back the necklace. The second story, The Americanization of Shadrach Cohen, written by Bruno Lessing, tells a story about Shadrach Cohen refused Americanized life style and finally changed his son’s values. The third story, Dead Men’s Path, written by Chinua Achebe, tells a story about Michael Obi, who tried to manage a school well into a excellent one, but at last he failed because he closed the ancestral footpath by force. The last story, The Grass-Eaters, written by Krishnan Varma, tells a story about an Indian refugee, told his unimaginable life in a tender way. I read the story and write my thoughts. First it is really hard for me to write out my thoughts. Slowly, I became practiced to write out what I thought of. I think it is a improvement.
The class has three timed writings. The timed writing is that we are given 45 minutes and a title, then in the limited time we write a article about the title. Since there exists a time limit, I have pressure on writing. While I was writing, I always had to consider the left time and to think about what I should write during the left time. It is a kind of train of writing under pressure.
I selected The Necklace as the main story to write my articles. I wrote three drafts. The first was the origin, and the next two were modified edition. Before writing the first draft, I managed to develop a thesis statement. First I can’t do it, but after the analysis about how to develop a thesis statement in the class, I learned the skill. Then with the thesis statement made by myself, I wrote the first draft. Then we were grouped to modify the first draft. My draft was viewed by my group mates. They gave me valuable suggestions for the poor draft one. I also read others’ draft in my group and thought for my opinions. From the draft one, I learned the basic skills to write articles, for examples, the title and authors of the story which was discussed should appear in the first of the story.
Then I modified the draft one and draft two issued. The draft two was commented by our instructor Mr. Ron. Then I learned that I failed to show my statement clearly. Then I modified it again to prove my thesis statement more strongly. Then draft three is the final version.
During the class I learned more from Mr. Ron as well as my classmates in the class. I will work hard in future and use what I learned in the class and practice more to enhance my writing skills.
Yours sincerely,
Yi Chen