Dear Professor Tumen,

In my portfolio, I included my Writing Projects 1 and 2. Working on these projects helped

me to become a stronger writer than when I first entered the classroom.

Writing Project 1 involved genre translation. We had to choose an original scholarly

article and translate it into a completely different genre. The genre I chose to translate it
into was a news article. Working on my initial draft of this project taught me a lot about
the news article genre. For this assignment, I analyzed many different examples of
news articles and determined similarities between them that made them their own
unique genre. I now understand how news articles are similar to academic articles in the
sense that they include important information but differ in how much they include. News
articles summarize main ideas and only include important points that will allow their
audience to get the gist of the topic.

For the initial revision of this project, I mainly focused on revising the visual aspect of it.
I made sure to include ads, pictures, headers, and footers that would typically be found
in a news article you would find online.

For my second revision, I made sure to focus more on the writing of the article. I made
sure to add more details and context on the research that was done and remove
unnecessary information that would otherwise distract the reader or is repeated too
often.

Writing Project 2 addresses academic conversation. For this assignment, we had to find
at least six articles that addressed a specific conversation about writing, reading, or
literacy and convey that conversation into a specific genre. The conversation I chose
was why people get distracted while doing reading/writing assignments and strategies
people can use to help prevent it from happening. I chose to translate this conversation
into a Twitter thread. Working on this assignment taught me more about the importance
of appealing to an audience. While working on this assignment, I had to make sure that
what I wrote would appeal to a social media audience and would be believable as a
social media post. I made sure that the tone of the replies for the different users are
believable as the personalities I gave them. If I wanted the user to have the personality
of an average social media user, I had to make sure that I included language, slang,
and emoticons that could be found in an average social media user’s posts.

For the initial revision of this project, I made changes to the visual presentation. I
included pictures for some of the replies and included more ads to the side of the
thread.

For the second revision of this project, I also focused more on the writing. For some of
the replies, I added more information so that the idea that the article is trying to describe
is clear. For example, for the user, McKinley Green, I provided more of an explanation
on why he is often distracted on his phone while in class.

These two projects allowed me to analyze two different genres: a news article and a
Twitter thread. Now that I’ve completed these projects, I would like to learn more about
other genres and the specific aspects of them that make that genre unique.

Throughout this course, I learned more about revision. Before taking this class, I saw
revision as a process of editing and cleaning up my work, making sure spelling and
grammar is correct and that my writing is not too repetitive. After reading the course
readings and listening to lectures, I now know that it is much more than that. Proper
revising involves completely changing how your writing is phrased and structured in
order to ensure that your main idea comes across exactly how you want it to your
readers. I was able to find better strategies when it comes to revising by reading Randi
Browning’s, “Revision Strategies.” This reading taught me what I should add, delete,
substitute, and rearrange within my writing to ensure that it is successful in conveying its
main idea. Now that I know these strategies, I will definitely continue to use them for all
of my writing assignments from now on.

Completing this course allowed me to be more aware of myself as a writer. I would

describe my personal writing style as creative. While working on these projects, I found
myself enjoying when I could write works that apply to specific genres. I really enjoyed
translating original sources into something completely different. When choosing a genre
to translate the articles into, I made sure to choose a genre that I would have fun
writing. Doing this made it especially enjoyable for me to translate the six articles from
the Writing Project 2 into a Twitter thread. For this project, I created different
personalities/users for each of the articles to represent a conversation between them.
Having the opportunity to do these kinds of projects showed me how much I enjoy
creative writing.

Sincerely,

Samarah Paulino