Kate's Writing Portfolio

Cover Letter

June 21, 2007

I come to this university from the city of Wuhan. An entrance test placed me in one of the advanced English classes, and in there I met a number of excellent students with a good mastery of the English language.  Fortunately, the education I received in high school enabled me to attain the same proficiency that my classmates had, but I was still not at the top of the class. However, being in an advanced class offers precious opportunities, and for this reason I continued to enroll in advanced courses. This semester I am taking an Academic Writing Course and, again, I was among a number of excellent fellow students in the course. Though at times frustrated, I usually found great encouragement.  I am aware that I am not the best in the class but I feel I have the ability and the perspective to see my fellow students as examples and their excellence as a goal to strive towards. I believe it is admirable to be an ambitious person, to try to create an environment for oneself that enables one to take up the challenge of competing with and, if possible, to exceed the abilities of one’s fellow students. This is what I believe I am doing.

In this class, I have discovered that I can express myself clearly but not vividly. I lack the ability to work out elegant sentences. While reading, I cannot accurately grasp the exact meaning that the author wishes to convey. After deep thought and analysis, I realize that the reasons may be the lack in my vocabulary and the scarcity of opportunities to practice my English. In brief, I believe I should spend more time learning English and using English. I have therefore revised my schedule and am devoting myself to revision. I do not let professional courses hold back my English study time. I carry a big heavy Oxford dictionary and English magazines to the self-study classroom; I learn the usage of the words or phrases that appear in the magazines, and take down notes on them, marking down beautiful expressions to be used in my own essays. Though the process is slow, I am continually working on it because I believe it is worthwhile.

I have listed below the items that I have worked on this semester.

I wrote reading logs about each story, and the “reading log” section contains one of them.

And from the four stories we have read I chose to have a discussion on “The Americanization of Shadrach Cohen”. I revised the essay again and again, thus there are three drafts. The development in the course of these three drafts is obvious. In our first peer review, my partner pointed out that the direction of the essay is clear but the language is dull, and stronger paragraph development would be better. My teacher read Draft Two, suggesting that there should be fewer quotations but more discussion in my own words. I took their advice, revised the discussion part a number of times, and polished the language. So Draft Three is more convincing and coherent.

In addition to this we had three special classes for timed-writing, in which we discussed certain topics within a limited period of time. In the very first class, I was not able to balance the time and article development. I was upset after the class and tried to practice writing articles at a faster pace on the computer. So in our second timed-writing class, I did much better, and to my amazement, there were also fewer careless mistakes in my article. Here I have posted my final timed-writing.

In this course, I met friends whose English abilities are excellent. This encouraged me to keep striving for progress. I wrote an essay, which was a true challenge and a significant step along with several timed-writings for which I received useful advice and suggestions from both the teacher and my fellow classmates. I have experienced the thrill of learning as well as using the English language and I will keep on pursuing improvement even though my credits on English courses have now finished.

26.5.07 04:29