Cover Letter
To whom it may concern:
Welcome to my writing portfolio and it is nice to meet all of you in the academic writing class from March to June, 2007. We have spent a sweet time together and did a few writings in this class, that is, free writing for fourteen times, four reading logs, timed-writing for three times and a formal essay.
I have had years of training about how to arrange better paragraphs and use more splendid words while writing in English. In this writing class, English seems to be a ‘mother tongue’ to me. Maybe this should be attributed to that Ron is a native American. He told us to make smooth writing, to write whatever we think of and not to worry about the grammar and spelling all the time. Thus, I lay more emphasis on the content rather than the form of the passage. Free-writing is the part I love the most. Now that I don’t need to show it to anyone else, I can follow my heart and write whatever I want. If I can not think of anything, I just need to write I can not think of anything until the words come to my pen. Free-writing without pressure allows us to have a boarder mind of the topic given.
I did four reading logs and chose the story the Americanization of Shadrach Cohen as my reading log in my writing portfolio for it is a story with happy ending. I wrote quite random and even associated the text I learned in my junior middle school. Gradually I learned how to give personal ideas after reading the story. This kind of practice laid a good foundation for the essay writing in the latter part of the class.
Timed-writing requires quick thinking and writing. It is challenging and the topic of final-timed writing was appealing. I put myself in the position of Mme. Loisel and imagined what she might feel and do if she had not lost her necklace.
Essay writing gave me a chance to learn to write formally and profoundly. In this part the Dead Men’s Path was my choice. The tragedy in the story trapped me into deepest sorrow. Although the ending of the story seemed absurd and appeared as a punishment to Michael Obi, I still think the tragedy was doomed to happen. If you are interested in why I think in this way, you can view the essay below.
From writing randomly to essay writing, I gain the ability to write in a formal way and attach importance to content by degrees and I can think of more angels when I get the topic. Depth of thought of the passage should be strengthened and more attention should be paid to how to write in a formal way. Finding evidence to support the thesis of the story and to convince others was crucial.
China and America have different culture and this difference reflects upon writing. For the past decade of years, our Chinese teachers used to teach us to quote beautiful sentences in our passages, but we never used quotation marks or mention the sentences were cited. We even did not do this when we took the college entrance examinations. Of course, too much quoting will be considered plagiarism.
Once, Ron told us to write a short fragment of the Dead Men’s Path on class. It had something to do with the background of the story. The only way to get the background information under the circumstances is to quote the background information before the essay. I copied the sentence but I forgot to use quotation marks. Ron saw this and pointed it out severely.
Then it called to my mind that Ron’s slides were always with “work cited” when he quoted other’s words. We have to admit that Americans lay much more emphasis on copyright than we do. This is the most impressing thing I learn from this writing class and it is a quite serious problem. I learned in a Korean film that if one quotes others’ words more than three times in an essay without “work cited”, the essay will be considered plagiarism. Asian culture does give enough emphasis to copyright and I did not get enough education of this kind. From now on, I start to think highly of copyright for this is what I have to do but used to neglect to do.
Thank you for taking time to read my writing portfolio.I learned a lot from peer review and made a few friends here. Thanks to Ron for your help. Best wishes to all of you.
Yours,
Angker Song