Dear whomever this may concern,

Greetings everyone, welcome to my Writing 2 final portfolio! Throughout this course my

writing has been based on the topic of neuroscience, which is also known as neurobiology. I
picked this topic to express my feelings toward biology in general, as a biology major at UC
Santa Barbara I felt it was perfect that we could pick any topic we want and get to do research to
learn more about. Growing up I have always looked up to doctors as basically life savers, and
anything I could do to give back to others and help others is exactly what I wanted to do with my
life. During this class we worked on different little writing assignments that led up to the
literature review and genre translation, and both of these writing projects focused on the
understanding of human exercise in the human brain.
Before coming into Writing 2 I was a little nervous and anxious because I do not consider
myself a good writer, thanks to the STEM life all I write is research papers or experiments haha,
but Professor Johnson showed us an article called “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading
Scholarly Sources” by Karen Rosenberg. Karen stated in the article, “A combination of
obstinacy, butt-numbingly hard chairs, and caffeine helped me survive my scholarly reading
assignments. But it wasn’t fun.” 1 I related to this so much because even in my first writing
course I took here at UC Santa Barbara I was finding myself thinking about something
completely different while skimming through pages and not retaining any information. While
writing this letter I hope you can get a feeling of my personal voice because that is key protocol
throughout this. I am really content with how this class turned out as well as my progression as a
writer as well as a student.
For the main writing assignment, the literature review, my revisions are focused on fixing
concision and clarity, the thesis statement, and the topic sentences of each paragraph. At first I
revised my paper by making it more concise in ways by taking out words that did not need to be
there, words like: really, very, generally, actually, different, etc. Another revision I made to my
paper is taking out phrases that you can replace with words because this assignment was so short.
A phrase I took out was “ it’s important to consider”, removing this phrase allowed me to be
more simple with the literature review and have it not be as confusing. The thesis statement also
tied into the concision and clarity due to the fact that the phrasing was difficult and confusing to
follow. For these edits, I was able to use the concision exercise form which was given to us by
our TA “Concision Exercise.” 2 The best exercise that helped me rephrase my thesis statement
was reading it aloud to myself over and over trying to figure out where the wording went wrong.
While reading over my thesis multiple times I found that it had a little too many words and the
best thing for me was to make the statement more straightforward. The handout that Professor
Johnson had given us, “Thesis Statements in Academic Writing” helped me with refining my

1
Rosenberg, K., 2021. [online] Wac.colostate.edu. Available at:
<https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/writingspaces2/rosenberg--reading-games.pdf> [Accessed 2 August 2021].
2
Johnson, Julie. “Concision Exercises.” Writing 2: Intro to Academic Writing (class handout University of
California Santa Barbara, July 27, 2021).
3
Johnson, Julie. “Thesis Statements in Academic Writing.” Writing 2: Intro to Academic Writing (class handout
University of California Santa Barbara, July 27, 2021.)
thesis. 3 I was able to begin connections between ideas while adding a “because” clause in the
mix.
Having my own writing on a website brings me joy because I would never expect this to
happen, especially the way I came into this class with my writing skills. My website shows not
just the writing assignments that we did in this class but every background has my favorite color,
blue. The thing I like the most about it is the genre translation, the google slides adds effect
because of all the images I use of neuroscience. I had also added a description of me and my
brother enjoying time together while working together. I hope you enjoy my website and can be
able to get a description of who I really am.
Hope you enjoy,
Trenton Luther

1
Rosenberg, K., 2021. [online] Wac.colostate.edu. Available at:
<https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/writingspaces2/rosenberg--reading-games.pdf> [Accessed 2 August 2021].
2
Johnson, Julie. “Concision Exercises.” Writing 2: Intro to Academic Writing (class handout University of
California Santa Barbara, July 27, 2021).
3
Johnson, Julie. “Thesis Statements in Academic Writing.” Writing 2: Intro to Academic Writing (class handout
University of California Santa Barbara, July 27, 2021.)
 Bibliography

Rosenberg, K., 2021. [online] Wac.colostate.edu. Available at:

<https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/writingspaces2/rosenberg--reading-games.pdf> [Accessed
2 August 2021].

Johnson, Julie. “Concision Exercises.” Writing 2: Intro to Academic Writing (class handout
University of California Santa Barbara, July 27, 2021).

Johnson, Julie. “Thesis Statements in Academic Writing.” Writing 2: Intro to Academic Writing
(class handout University of California Santa Barbara, July 27, 2021.)

1
Rosenberg, K., 2021. [online] Wac.colostate.edu. Available at:
<https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/writingspaces2/rosenberg--reading-games.pdf> [Accessed 2 August 2021].
2
Johnson, Julie. “Concision Exercises.” Writing 2: Intro to Academic Writing (class handout University of
California Santa Barbara, July 27, 2021).
3
Johnson, Julie. “Thesis Statements in Academic Writing.” Writing 2: Intro to Academic Writing (class handout
University of California Santa Barbara, July 27, 2021.)