Eportfolio Cover Letter

March 22, 2019

Dear Prof. Fedorova,

Coming into this writing course, I wasn’t very confident in my writing and was unsure of my abilities to convey ideas effectively to an audience. In fact, before coming into this course, I didn’t give much attention to who I was writing to. I would get into vicious cycles writing a sentence and deleting it because it’s wasn’t perfect and at the end, I would have nothing down because I was uncomfortable leaving something less than what I thought was perfect. I didn’t feel comfortable having paragraphs be only one or two sentences, leading to long drawn out paragraphs with two or more ideas that are vaguely related to each other.

I didn’t realize it but writing rules from high school were constricting my abilities to convey my ideas accurately. I was too focused on following rules like limiting forms of be, not referring to myself in writing, and following the five-paragraph essay format. Overall, I was lost and misdirected when it came to writing.

Writing 2 took all of this and turned it on its head. Throughout this course, my approach to writing has completely changed.

The most influential assigned reading to my writing process and my quality of writing as a whole was “Teaching Thinking by Teaching Writing” by Peter Elbow. The introduction of first and second order thinking into my writing process allowed me to first get my ideas down first , or what Elbow wrote, “the postponing of vigilance and control during the early stages of writing” (Elbow), without the stress of it being perfect, what I felt was the biggest mental roadblock in my writing. Being able to go back to my ideas and revise them was something I never thought I would be comfortable with, but now use to tackle every writing assignment.

This writing course taught me how to recognize the genre with which I am writing in and to whom I am writing to. Kerry Dirk’s “Navigating Genres” really cemented the idea of genre conventions and how to write within a genre. A quote from Dirk’s writing that especially helped me in understanding genres was “telling a joke, writing an email, [and] uploading a witty status on Facebook” (Dirk) and explaining that these examples while not being traditional genres are unique genres defined by their own conventions. With my Writing Project 1 assignment, I attempted to observe and analyze the genre conventions of a discourse community of my choosing, Epic Movement, as to show my mastery of genre analysis. While I don’t think this Writing Project specifically displayed my best work, it was still a great improvement over the writing I produced before this course.

With the help of the second Writing Project, I learned how to go about writing a research paper, while learning what good academic writing is in the field of economics. I was able to create and refine a research question as to specify my research and to have a clear topic to discuss in my Writing Project. For this assignment, I was required to read and cite academic articles, something that I had done before but never felt comfortable with and never had a proper approach for. The assigned reading, “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources” by Karen Rosenberg I felt really prepared me for this Writing Project. When reading academic articles in the past I felt like I had to understand all of the seemingly boring material that was in the article, which would lead me to frustration when the author’s writing would just fly over my head. This usually resulted in me resorting to scanning for quotes simply for the purpose of reaching the quote requirement in whatever assignment I was doing. Rosenberg’s writing taught me to recognize that most of the time I am not the intended audience for these articles and that it’s ok when the author “assume[s] prior knowledge” in their audience.

The final Writing Project, I felt was my best work and was a result of all I learned in this writing course. I felt really comfortable with my writing process and was able to use my knowledge of genres that I had accrued of these past ten weeks to display my understanding of genres and their purpose and conventions. The translation was an opportunity to break from traditional writing assignments and explore creative writing, something I never thought I’d like or see myself doing. The translation was the ultimate example of being able to understand the purpose, ideas, and context of a story presented in one genre and accurately displaying them in the lens of another genre.

I’d like to end this letter with a simple thank you for the guidance you provided throughout the course and the writing lessons you taught me. There’s no doubt I am a better writer now than I was ten weeks ago when I first walked in. To be honest, before this course writing was one of my biggest fears in my academic career and I would always stress about writing essays in college but you allowed me to overcome this fear and feel confident in my abilities as a writer. Thank you.

Your student,

Sebastian Gutierrez

Works Cited Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 1, Parlor Press,2010 Elbow, Peter. “Teaching Thinking by Teaching Writing.” Change, vol. 15, no. 6, 1983, pp. 37– 40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40164191. Lowe, Charles, and Pavel Zemliansky. Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. Parlor Press, 2010.