Giri 1

Tara Giri

Writ 2

Professor Valentina Fahler

12 June 2020

Final Portfolio Cover Letter

Dear Valentina,

Throughout the process of writing and revising WPs this quarter, I have learned how to

better hone my writing skills as well as how to reflect upon my past to prevent the same writing

mistakes that I have been making for years. They have taught me how to reflect on my writing

choices and how to improve them. Not only that, but unlike other writing classes and projects I

have had in the past, this class has shown me how to think critically about why I make some of

the writing choices I make. Taking into consideration factors like my past failures and successes,

past teachers, and past projects, this class has taught me to reflect upon how those might have

affected my writing to this day. I believe that that reflection has had the biggest impact on the

improvement of my writing. Every time I have edited my papers in the past, I have noticed that

there are some mistakes that I kept making each and every time. Despite correcting them, I still

would make them on another project. By delving deep into the reasons behind these consistent

mistakes, this class has forever changed my writing style and ability which has made me less

likely to commit those mistakes again. I would still like to know more about how to improve my

narrative writing and genre translation skills. While I believe this class has taught me quite a bit

about how to contemplate my writing choices and why I made them, I think that I could learn

more about how to polish the essential skill of genre translation. I was not completely confident
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on how well I performed my genre translation in my WP2 and I was not sure if it felt like a real

narrative. I hope that in the future I will be able to learn more about what it means to transition

and translate between two genres flawlessly.

In my WPs, I focused on how to be more concise, how to write topic sentences that

focused more upon rhetorical tools and the overall idea of the body paragraph itself, and how to

craft a better thesis statement that encompassed a solid idea about genres as a whole. Throughout

both my WP1 and my WP2, I found that the way that I wrote was very long-winded and wordy.

In order to bring just one point across, I would take up multiple lines with words that were not

necessary and ideas that I tended to repeat throughout the entire paper. On top of that, some of

my ideas entirely just were not necessary and did not relate well to my thesis or the workings of

genres. I ended up deleting quite a few sentences and big chunks of my paragraphs due to this.

My paragraphs ended up being quite short due to this but I noticed that I did not focus much on

evidence or the readings from class. I often would put in a quote or evidence and my analysis for

it was quite lackluster. I decided that it would be best to focus my revising time then on diving

deeper into the evidence from both my genre pieces as well as the in-class reading which put in

new ideas that I had not already repeated previously in my paper and it added some length to my

paragraphs. On top of that, my topic sentences did not have a clear focus. They did not always

connect back to my thesis and they were more focused on the content of the genres rather than

the actual writing tools that the authors utilized. To solve this, I sifted through the content of my

body paragraphs and found the main ideas that I believed were very important and actually

related to the rhetorical tools that I focused upon. I then used these main ideas to craft topic

sentences that had a clearer target and a better connection to my overall thesis. However, I
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noticed that in both of my writing projects, my thesis was quite lacking as well, especially in my

WP2. I was not sure on what exactly I was supposed to be arguing about and so my thesis ended

up being mostly just a summary of the ideas that I presented in my essay rather than one overall

encompassing idea that I was trying to prove. In order to fix this, I again sifted through my paper

to find multiple pieces of evidence that led to one overall point that I could make. I gathered up

all of these pieces of evidence and utilized them to generate a thesis statement that was clear,

concise, and related back to the writing styles of genres. I also edited my body paragraphs as

well to ensure that they connected back to my thesis.

The feedback about my clarity was the most important to me throughout this process.

Considering that many of my sentences were very long-winded and wordy, I was always unsure

if my reader could actually understand what I was trying to convey. I noticed that many of my

sentences seemed to be very clunky and awkward as well yet again, I did not know how to fix

them or if they were even readable. Having someone peer review my paper specifically for

clarity was extremely helpful during all of this because they helped my paper flow a lot more

smoothly and made it much more coherent.

What I liked most about my writing was my ability to explain the choices behind the

authors’ writing choices and what I liked least was my poorly organized main overall idea. I felt

that I did very well in interpreting why many of the authors in each of the genres that I analyzed

made the writing choices that they did. Utilizing evidence from the class readings as well as

specific pieces of evidence that I pulled from the writing sources themselves, I believe that I

accurately gave detailed answers that delved deep into the subtle choices made by the authors.

These illustrated the differences between the genres and how they affected the audience.
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However, as I have said previously, I believe that my overall thesis was very lackluster. I did not

have a main idea that I was focusing upon and even if I did have a thesis, I did not refer back to it

very many times throughout my text. I mostly focused on different aspects of each of the genres

that I studied without having a solid argument that I was trying to make while analyzing them.

Overall, the work in my portfolio has demonstrated that I have learned how to truly

reflect on the writing choices that I make as an author and how those affect the way that my

audience comprehends my writing pieces. The main concept that my professor emphasized

throughout the entire quarter was the concept of self-reflection. Throughout this portfolio, I have

had to really dive deep into the ways that my writing was lacking in both of my writing projects

despite the fact that I initially thought that my projects were the best that they could be. When I

received peer feedback as well as the professor’s feedback however, I realized that they could be

greatly improved. Using their feedback as well as my own thoughts on my projects, I greatly

edited and improved them to be even stronger. Despite my initial struggles to understand what

could be enhanced in these projects, this portfolio has illustrated my strengthened skills in

reflecting upon my mistakes and fixing them to the best of my ability.

In the future, I will take my greatly improved skill in analyzing the choices made by

authors as well as peer feedback to other writing courses. I have never had a writing class where

I had to reflect upon not only my writing choices but also the writing choices of others and how

they affect their audience. While I normally focused on the content of writing pieces, this class

has aided me in developing a clearer understanding of the inner workings of the writing itself.

With that, I can now edit my own papers with better clarity because I know now how my writing

style will affect my audience and I know the ways in which to make my writing more effective to
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that audience. This applies not only to my papers but my peers’ papers as well. The questions

that the professor gave me to consider when looking over my classmates’ writing were ones that

I had never encountered before and they have forever deepened my understanding of my peers’

writing process. In the future, I know now how to not only edit the content of my peers’ papers

but also how to improve the way that they write which makes a tremendous difference.

Sincerely,

Tara Giri