Natalie's Writing Portfolio

Cover Letter

To whom it may concern:

Hello. I am Natalie Yang, a junior student in Fudan University, Shanghai, China, and majored in Optical Science and Engineering.

I started writing in English since my ninth grade; unfortunately, not until my entering college did I realize the significance and difficulty of writing, which already becomes my weakest part among the integrant English skills. For I always find myself boggle down in the situation where I have thousand things to say while don’t know how to express it. The agony did grow during my preparation for the Analysis Writing in the GRE test.

I am very lucky to register this Academic Writing Class on the last minute although I missed the second lesson, because after the audition of this class, I barely believe there will be anyone intend to step aside, leaving me the chance to register it. I have to say to anyone who gave up this class at the very beginning: what a lost, because you could learned a lot in this class. During this magic journey of writing class, I’ve got tons of opportunity to read, to write and more importantly, to think. The free-writing section, the routine of every lesson, likes a desert to warm us up. During the first ten minutes of lesson, we could think and write freely on the subjects Pro. Corio gives us, which, sometime, are related to the content of the story we are going to discuss, sometimes hint us where we are now of the “journey”. The reading story and the response section could be my favorite part, (although I missed the first time because of the “last minute luck”.) In this part, I could not only actually read into the story, analysis the characters, but also get the opportunity to read my peers’ thoughts and appreciate their beautiful language. To tell the truth, I dare not say I read all of the response, but I did my best to read most of them. The essay-writing is the most effectiveness part for the improvement of my writing skill, the part I will state below.

So here, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Pro. Ron Corio who provides us such an opportunity to improve our writing skill and to involve in a vivid US class. For, taking this class let me truly understand the essential of writing---express the ideas efficiently rather that make the language as beautiful as one can. So what we focused on in this class is the controlling idea which functions like a seed through which the paper, and the languages, will grow.

I would like to give introduction to the paper I’ve selected.

The reason I choose the Necklace for my essay is that the plot of this story is attractive enough for me to read repeatedly without been bored, and the imagination of the writer is so phenomenal that the ending of the story is very impressive and I can’t guess before hand. Bang! The draft one came. It is my first essay about analysis a story, so I was a little bit confused it with a reading log. Although it has a thesis statement--- what causes the tragedy of Mathilde, the body is more like a development of my comparatively free thought rather than the support to the thesis. Almost every paragraph lacks a focus. You could also see some grammatical errors which I always make and could find by myself.

Draft two is based on the work of peer revise. I would like to thank Young Running’s patient. Thanks to his help, I revised most of grammatical errs such as fragment, and changed some of the sentences into more native ways of expressing.

Draft three was changed a lot from draft two after I read Ron’s constructive suggestions. Since then, I realized my thesis was ill supported, and begin to work on my content. I reorganized my paragraphs to make sure every paragraph has a centre and the sentences are developing relatively and in a cogent way. Also, I add something about the background to indicate that my thesis is sound. If I call the draft one is the direct reflection of free analysis, then the draft three is the reasonable expression, at least I hope so.

I think my Final-time writing is the best among the free time-writing, partly because I am a lucky girl writing an essay about necklace, partly because after the whole semester of training I could make less errs. The reading log about the Grass Eater shows some of my unique thoughts, I believe.

I quite enjoy this class and will not stop practicing my writing.

Thanks for you patient and hope you can enjoy the paper below.

Sincerely,