To Whom It May Concern:
Thank you for your taking time to read my selected works for my portfolio. When you read these papers, you will find that most of them are focused on the story, “the Necklace”, a masterpiece of Guy de Maupassant whose literature works I am most interested in. In the story, I am deeply impressed by the main character, Matholve Loisel because she set an example for us. She told us that when facing difficulties rather than bemoaning the state of the universe and pitying the fate, we can come over any difficulties as long as we held a belief in our heart. I have selected three draft of my essay to submit in my portfolio. Each one represents what I think of Mme.Loisel at different time.
Before my taking this writing class, I actually had little confidence in my English skill. However, through nearly four-month learning, I feel my English skills have made great progress both in reading and in writing with the help of my teacher and classmates. As to reading, I no longer look into dictionary when come across new words. Compared with reading, I made more achievements in writing. I feel much easier to express my thoughts through my papers. I am able to select evidence to support my point of view. I spent several days to write thesis statements which live up to the teacher’s standard. Moreover, I learned to cooperate with others by conducting peer reviewing. In the process, I tried to help the writer understand what is effective in the paper and what might be done better. At the same time, I learned to accept comments rather than wasting time defending my ground. In fact, my paper will not get improved without the help of my classmates.
There are six papers that I have submitted to the portfolio. They are arranged in the order form best to worst so that as you read from paper to paper you can see how they have been improved.
Three of them are the essay drafts. To me, writing an essay is not such a difficult task at all. However, writing a essay in English is still a big challenge to me for this is my first try at all. The first problem I met with is to find a strong and clear thesis statement with enough evidence to support. When I submit ed my first statement Mr. Corio pointed out that my thesis statement is not clear enough and there are not enough evidence to support is as well. So I spent several days in thinking out a better statement which finally lived up to Mr. Corio’ requirements. You can see it in the draft one. After I finished the draft one, I exchanged it with my classmates. I received many helpful suggestions from them. Based on the suggestions, I collected grammar mistakes, improved quotations, and added my own comments on the story. Thus I finished the draft two and draft three.
The final timed-writing is one part of our final exam. It requires writing a article in limited time. This is very hard to me at first because I often failed to finish my writing in time. So later I took Mr. Corio’s advice that I write out the main idea of each paragraph first and set aside about five to ten minutes to edit what I have written. Later, I became used to the timed-writing.
The reading log represents my thought on the story, “the necklace”, when I read it for the first time.
Thank you for taking time to read my papers. I hope you enjoyed reading each one and that you learned from my ideas.
Sincerely,
Warren Ge
