Dear Miss.

Johnson and other potential viewers:

This quarter has been a challenging one for me personally, because I am taking five
classes and dealing with many other issues at the same time. I really want to use this opportunity
to thank Miss. Johnson for always being so supportive and understanding of the stress that
students are going through. Writing 2 has been a great experience for me, because I was really
worried a lot about the workload and my own writing skills. Miss. Johnson is able to offer me an
amazing experience with the writing class that includes different kinds of writing, activities and
good communication.
Before taking this writing course, I was not confident about my writing skills that I was
bounded by the writing “rules” in high school. For example, all my essays will be five
paragraphs with introduction, conclusion and three body paragraphs no matter how long they are.
I was not clear about the real purpose of the thesis and conclusion so that many times my one
sentence thesis is too long and does not reflect the content of main ideas, and conclusion is too
repetitive with the body paragraphs. In the Thesis Statement Guide Handout by Julie Johnson, it
introduces the relationship between the thesis and introduction, which “should in some way
reflect the logic that brought you to your argument”1. The introduction can define some terms,
explain some general arguments and lead to the thesis statement. I used to write a thesis
statement separately from the introduction. But now I learn to write an introduction that can flow
to the thesis logically and let them connect with the body paragraphs more coherently. I do not
limit myself to the five-paragraph structure anymore, and I am able to organize my essay in a
clear way. Another thing about my writing has evolved this quarter is the conclusion part. I
changed my old conclusion style of summarizing the whole essay to offering a sense of
completeness with a provoking way for later discussion.
By writing two essays this quarter, I learned a lot more about genre, genre conventions,
rhetorical situations, translation, explication essay and literature review. The quarter started by
revising my understanding of the genre. According to Amy Devitt, genre should not be simply
defined as the discussion of types, because it is more about the appropriate ways of expression
related to repeating rhetorical situations.2 I used to only think of genres as the types of novels,
like the romantic novels and science fiction novels. This class added more terms to the genre that
it is related to rhetorical situations and genre conventions. In the Rhetorical Situation Poster, it
states that every rhetorical situation comes with three parts, audience, purpose and constraints3.
And the translation and explication essay are expanded based on the three components of
rhetorical situations. Later, I learned to write a literature review for the first time.
I have made a lot of revisions for both WP1 and WP2, and I would like to show you some
of the major changes. Firstly, I changed my thesis statement. I think the thesis statement is one of

1
Johnson, Julie, Thesis Statements in Academic Writing
2
Amy Devitt, Generalizing About Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept, 576.
3
“Rhetorical Situation Poster.” National Council of Teachers of English, 2010, pp 1-2.
https://gauchospace.ucsb.edu/courses/pluginfile.php/15096942/mod_resource/content/2/Rhetorical%20Si
tuation%20Poster-1-2.pdf
the most important parts in the writing that should provide the reader with some understanding of
the body paragraphs and push them to keep reading. In my two final drafts, both thesis
statements were either not specific or not direct enough to show readers my arguments. So, for
WP1, I edited the thesis statement to be more specific about the changes in rhetorical situations
due to translating peer reviewed article to children’s book, such as “audience will change from
scholars to children and parents” and convention will change “from professional, long
paragraphs to short, easy sentences”. By doing this, people can have a clear understanding of
what major things have changed due to the genre translation. For WP2, I rewrote the thesis
statement in order to create a clear structure for the body paragraphs and establish some direct
arguments. In the final draft, I was simply stating that the literature review “provides people
some insights about several social issues related with gender inequality”, which is too vague and
without any direct argument. Now, I revised the thesis by splitting it into two sentences to
establish my arguments. The women’s rights and wage gap are the topics to prove the existence
of gender inequality in society right now and historically. Feminism, men’s role in gender
inequality and importance of educating people are topics as the solutions to raise awareness for
gender inequality. By doing this, the rest of the essay will have a clear structure, and the thesis
will not be one extremely long sentence. Secondly, I added a lot of quotes both from Writing2
course readings and from online sources to define specific terms and support my arguments. My
final drafts were not using enough quotes that some terms lacked explanation, and arguments
were too vague without actual evidence. I added quotes to show the evidence of governments
and human rights organizations using excuses to ignore women’s rights. And using quotes to
support the argument that the author provides some possible solutions to women’s rights. I also
added more specific quotes and data from Mary Leisenring to support the existence of the wage
gap and show the reader the changes related with time and education level. By adding more
quotes, it can better support my arguments of gender inequality in a direct way, so my analysis
will not be too vague and hard to understand. I learned to incorporate more course material in the
writing to define specific terms like rhetorical situations, literature review to offer reader
explanations that they may need. Thirdly, I revised my final drafts to create a good, organizing
structure. For WP1, I distributed a whole paragraph of the discussion of change in conventions
into the other body paragraphs. Because by having it as the separate paragraph, it disrupted my
organization and flow of the essay. By putting them into different paragraphs, I was able to draw
specific connections between the change of conventions with the translation of genres and
specific rhetorical situations. I also rewrote the paragraph about the constraints that it was more
about conventions, now I reflected the change in conventions with the constraints of certain
genres, so the reader will not feel confused.
I made some personal designs on Weebly to present my final portfolio. I established a
welcome page that contains some information about me with some photos of my pets, because I
want readers to be interested in my website and know me better as a person. I put introduction
letter, WP1 and WP2 into three separate paragraphs to offer readers a simple and direct way of
reading different works of mine. I designed the page link on the top right hand side, so it is easier
for readers to navigate and explore. There is a quick link to the next page at the bottom of every
page, so they can just continue reading or use the right hand side navigation based on their
preference. For presenting the article, I used the Scribd Document that allows readers to read the
article directly on the website without having to download them.

Sincerely,
Jiaying Mao
 Bibliography

Devitt, Amy J. “Generalizing About Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept.” College

Composition and Communication 44.4 (1993): 573–86. Print.

Johnson, Julie, Thesis Statements in Academic Writing, University of California, Santa Barbara,

April 12, 2021.

“Rhetorical Situation Poster.” National Council of Teachers of English, 2010, 1-2.

https://gauchospace.ucsb.edu/courses/pluginfile.php/15096942/mod_resource/content/2/

Rhetorical%20Situation%20Poster-1-2.pdf