Cover Letter

Cover Letter
To those who may read my portfolio:

At the beginning, I want to show my sincere gratitude to all the readers who have spent your time on my blog portfolio, and your concern is my best motivity to go on my writing. In this portfolio, I have selected six works (including the cover letter) from the academic writing course to show what I have learnt in the writing. Writing practice, which is the main theme of this course, attracts me so much in this semester. We take a free writing every class, and the topic is various. You may write down whatever comes to your mind about the topic, and I can write more and more in the ten minutes after several times of training. I think this method is very effective to train the fast writing skill, and the more you write, the better you will be.

Mr. Corio, our respectful teacher, says to us that writing can not be separated from reading, which impresses me deeply. And during the course, all of our writing works are based on the four international stories: The Necklace, The Americanization of Shadrach Cohen, Dead Men’s Path and The Grass-Eaters. We read the story first and then made comments, which is also called the reading log, on the internet classroom. We discuss the content of the story and even how the author wrote the story. Through understanding the writing methods used by many famous authors in their stories, we may imitate and learn from their advanced writing techniques. For example, we may learn what the reasonable writing structure is and how to select an appropriate word from your large vocabulary list. The teacher always says, “Read, write, read, write, read….” Yes and only through which, may you make a fast progress in your writing. I know this and really take it into practice this semester and you may check my following documents to see whether I have made any progress in my writing.

The following five documents stand for the works from the various periods this semester and you may see a clear process on how I endeavor to practice my writing.

The first article is the reading log based on The Americanization of Shadrach Cohen. I think the story really hit some points even to the developing countries like china. Thus I wrote the reading log on what can the Chinese learn from Shadrach’s Americanization. This log was written in the early stage of this semester, and there exists some mistakes of grammar and vocabulary.

Then there is the final timed writing work, which was written in 45 minutes yesterday. I spent so much time considering how to answer the questions that I didn’t have adequate time writing and proofreading the passages. Maybe you may find the work a bit disorder, but anyway, it is a timed writing work.

Then here come the essay draft one, two and three. The essay is the most important task of this course and I wrote my essay based on The Necklace. This is a very popular story and I guess everybody has read it before. Thus I think I may have a good point of view on the story and write down something that everyone may understand easily. I choose the frequent contrasts used in the story to illustrate its effect and meaning. Then the continual revision is necessary to get a good essay. In essay draft one I just wrote down some main ideas, thesis statement and evidences. And in the draft two, I take my peer’s suggestion and supply more content to sport the thesis. Meanwhile, the teacher also gave me some suggestions on not using too many quotations and I learnt to paraphrase them on my draft three. And after the revisions for many times, there are few mistakes on my draft three, which shows my improvement on proofreading and even writing.

And at the end of this cover letter, I want to thank my dear teacher Ron. It is your careful and patient direction that gives me many helps in my writing. Thank you Ron and every other visitor, and I hope you will like reading this portfolio.

Your sincere
Park Pan

30.5.07 13:47