Liam Downing

Cover letter

5/18/20

Dear Professor Ferrara,

When I first enrolled in your course my writing was accompanied by many

improficiencies that I believe I have concurred over the duration of this semester. One major

aspect of writing that gave me trouble earlier in the year was how to organize my thoughts. It

was initially difficult for me to have a very broad topic that I had to write about. I would always

have many ideas about my writing and what I wanted to say in my writing but often found it

difficult to decide what to include. I have improved this aspect of my writing significantly since

the beginning of the course due to practice activities in class and repetition. It was also very

difficult for me to know when to break up paragraphs when the semester began. I have also

greatly improved on this skill. One of my biggest issues while editing was deciding which

thoughts belong in which paragraph. Now in my writing I am able to successfully organize

thoughts into their respective paragraph with similar ideas. An additional problem in my writing

was made visible to me while constructing my narrative. I struggled with showing character

development. It was easy for me to show my own character development over the season

because it was something I had personally experienced and could show how it changed my

character. Showing the development of other characters in my story was very difficult for me

because I could not use a first person account of what events throughout the period of the

narrative affected a character in a certain way. Although this was challenging, I believe I showed

character progression well by introducing characters early and showing a change in their attitude

or mannerisms after certain events.

 While writing these narratives and essays, I have learned many valuable skills to further

my writing ability. First and foremost, I learned how to effectively use dialogue in a narrative as

well as the correct format. Learning to use dialogue was very helpful to my narrative because it

allowed me to provide an insight to a character’s personality without describing it. Dialogue

allows a writer to show ways that the author or main character would interact with another

character without the need for describing the entire scenario. I have also learned how to correctly

cite pieces of work when constructing an informational essay.

The progression of this course has taught me to plan my essays more carefully in order to

eliminate trouble that I had with paragraphs and structure. I believe that I displayed this

progression of writing skill in the literacy narrative, rhetorical analysis, and multimodal paper.

Another thing I will do in the future is have another person read my paper. I learned this

semester that I am sometimes blind to my own mistakes,m when peer editing my writing showed

many ways it could be improved. The quality of my writing greatly increased every time I had

somebody edit my paper while I learned what to look for in my own writing by editing others’

papers. I have seen my own use of rhetoric increase greatly and my ability to compose writing

has become exponentially better.