Cover Letter for Portfolio

Within the span of just a few months I have grown as a writer through each draft and paper I completed in ENC 1101. I have learned a lot in high school on how to improve my writing, but college has changed my overall writing process and perspective on writing. We have completed four major assignments during this course, all serving for different purposes. The first assignment was our literacy narrative, where we were asked to complete a story of how our reading and writing has effected our lives. The next one was a writing contest/rhetorical analysis, where we wrote an essay for any essay contest posted online, and then completed a rhetorical analysis on why the creators of the essay contest created it in the first place. After that assignment was the process essay, where we wrote an essay on our writing process and how effective it is. Lastly, our major assignment was an ethnography. For the ethnography we picked a community and researched it, this long assignment contained interviews and unanswered questions about the community.

I accomplished outcome number one, demonstrating an understanding of writing processes, through my writing process essay. Ever since middle school, we were taught one way to write an essay, which was a five paragraph essay with an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. At first it was hard for me to not follow the way I’ve been taught. I even thought of three ideas that support a thesis, but soon realized that format would not fit this type of essay. I eventually just wrote my writing process as a story, and ended up with having thirteen paragraphs. After completing my first draft and receiving peer reviews on it, I was given the comment to go into more detail on my process because I only scratched the surface. I also was told to make the essay more personal, because the reader said it was a little boring to read at times. To accommodate this, I added, “I’d like to be able to say that I write for enjoyment, but that would not be the truth.  At this point, most of the writing I do is required”. I think this gives the reader a better idea of who I am as a writer.

            I completed outcome two, demonstrating an awareness of rhetorical situation, through my essay competition essay and rhetorical analysis of it. This essay was the most difficult for me because I have never written a rhetorical analysis before and it required me to do a lot of research on how to successfully complete one. I am used to writing research essays or persuasive essays, but this one required me to write in a different situation and make me question the motives of a company who created this essay contest. This essay I did the worst on because I didn’t include real reasons on why the company posted this contest. My writing was also confusing one of my peer reviews said because I kept on going back and forth on potential reasons and did not stick with one reason. I changed the conflicting viewpoints for my final draft and made it more clear what I actually think.

           I demonstrated the third outcome, which was being able to successfully read complex texts and decipher them. In my process essay we were asked to read Anne Lamotts “Shitty First Drafts” and Mike Roses “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivists Analysis of Writer’s Block”, and use information from both of them to support our process. These readings were difficult to read through and required me to look up words and reread certain sections over and over to fully understand it. However, I found quotes that perfectly summed up my writing process, one was “The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.” I put this quote in the right context when I was explaining how I write a brain dump of my thoughts before I write an essay.

The last outcome was to demonstrate an awareness of the relationship between a discourse genre and their related communities, and I did this through my ethnography. In my first draft I received a comment saying I needed to “show” more and not tell the reader what to think. My community was EDM ravers, so in my first draft I stated that I was at a festival, but didn’t describe what the actual festival was like. So I added instead “As I walked through the dusty field where EDC is held, all of the lights, people, and loud music amazed me. There were three stages at EDC and the main stage was humongous with lights everywhere changing colors, and it was decorated with a big circle screen in the center with different visuals from artists, and owls on each side of the stage.” I also received a comment complementing me on using quotes from my interview, which really described the community well. One of the quotes was “It is so accepting, there is no rejection, and everyone loves each other, the feeling is really hard to explain, but that feeling is what makes me keep going to raves.” This quote describes the actually feeling of a raver, and instead of me telling the reader how ravers feel, this describes it well.