Cover Letter for ePortfolio

Dear portfolio reader

I am taking Professor Lucenko’s WRT 102 this semester, and I learned a lot from her lessons and reading material she provided for us students. I am a international student and just transferred from China last semester in which I took WRT 101 class. I got an A in that class, so I thought this semester I could do as well as I did in last semester.  Things did not go the same direction as I assumed. I faced a lot of difficulties such as many grammar errors, logic fallacies and work cited problems, all of which lowered my grade. However, I did not give in to these difficulties. Under the instruction of the professor, I gradually made progress.

When I was in China’s university, I have never been asked for writing a rhetorical analysis. It was a completely new kind of essay for me when I got to know it at WRT 101 class. Since the requirements of WRT 101 were lower in like the numbers of pages and tolerance for undeveloped argument, it is not so hard to finish a good rhetorical essay. However, the requirements in WRT102 reaches higher level, I cannot handle it easily. Besides trying to absorb everything the professor taught in class, I surf on Internet to find necessary examples of rhetorical techniques such as consideration for intended audience, language of article, attempt to fill interest gap, knowledge gap and etc. to help me understand them. After understanding these techniques, I did really detailed analysis for every reading material based on some simple rhetorical techniques that I learned from WRT 101 and these sophisticated techniques taught in WRT 102. Not until I had a full understanding about how these rhetorical techniques work in reading material, did I started to work on my essay. I am happy that through WRT 102 class, I learned a new thing.

Understanding what I am going to write is the first step. The second step is to integrate all my analysis together and form a complete essay. I will take my comparative paper as the example. Teacher provides us two ways of organizing the essay which are block style and point to point style. I chose the later one, because I thought it was better to make my argument clear. I organized every body paragraph in a same way. Firstly, I declared what the similarities or differences of the two articles. For example, I argued, “Both articles adopt comparison and contrast to arouse readers’ interests.” I explained how comparison and contrast help to stir readers’ interests and took out evidences from both articles to present readers my thinking process.

Trough all the semester, I can recognize my improvements: less grammar mistakes, less logical fallacies, and more solid argument. I will not just stop here. I am going to strive for better writing skills. Although my major is economics which does not require excellent skills, I love writing something to express myself even without a reader.

Sincerely

Nanjun Wang