Castro 1

Ana Castro
Professor Melton
May 6, 2016
Portfolio Cover Letter
The process of writing is challenging, but writing is all over the place and it occurs at any
time. The process of your writing continues and improved as you continue school and practice
different skills, and in my case, writing has evolved majorly entering my first year of college in
my English class. Coming from high school, I have been exposed to many different methods of
writing, and in college, I was able to grow academically. I use to do assignments in a rush
without doing much work to any essays, or assignments, but throughout time, my skills in
reading, writing, and research has improved to be better with time and work. My achievements
on my writing process and understanding of different assignments are shown within the
assignments that were done in English 5.
In this course, reading was the most important thing in order to get a clear idea of how to
evolve and develop new writing skills for specific assignments. The book that we originally read
throughout the semester was called They Say I Say by Gerald Graf and Cathy Birkenstein. This
book focuses on giving different ways and examples in which and essay can be improved. This
achieves the completion of goal number three, which states, To help students develop a
metacognitive understanding of processes of reading, writing and thinking. In other words,
while reading the text, we made connections that were mentioned in the book to the essays that
were written in order to improve our writing skills. The strategies that were available to us
throughout the book was helpful simply because we saw a different way in which many of our
sentences could have been written. This has helped me and has become one of my strengths as I

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continue to practice this skill. This particular goal also allowed me to meet another course
goal, which was goal number two. The book itself allowed me to have an idea of multiple ways
that students can construct and essay. All of the essay that were written, as well as the small
assignments that were done in this course were structured so that we had evidence to support our
claims. Every assignment that Ive done contains quotes, statistics, or any form of support that
had to be organized first. When doing this, I find it difficult to weave in my actual form of
support into the whole paragraph itself. Ive had some practice for this as I wrote the dialectical
journals that were given in class but there were times where I was completely lost. Continuing
this practice will allow me to get better at developing other strategies appropriate to each
assignment.
Beginning to write is a complete weakness of mine due to the struggle I face constructing
sentences to flow together. Throughout the course, we completed three major essay assignments
that took quite some time to finish. All three were important but the one that I had the most
struggles with was the rhetorical analysis. For the completion of this essay, I had to put in a lot of
time and effort. I struggled with the use of ethos, pathos, and logos as I was trying to incorporate
them into the essay. Some of the examples that I took out form the speech I decided to focus on
were not as useful. In fact, I had to create and analysis that connect that with that the speaker
wanted the audience to know or feel. When we took this assignment to class for revision, it
allowed me to gain more feedback, which help me read goal number five. I shared my
writing with one of my classmates and since we were doing the same assignment, she was able to
share some of her ideas with me. This made my process much easier and much understandable.
Working in a group also allowed me to hear the ideas of other, rather than just doing what I

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though was the appropriate thing to do. I decided to include other information that I had not
though about, like when Steve Jobs quit school and when he was fired from his own company.
As I wrote, it allowed me to connect with many other materials that I did not have enough
knowledge about. All of these assignments allowed me to make connects of any kind and it
allowed me to complete course goal number six, which allows students to make connections
with what is done in class to other things. For example, for the rhetorical essay, I was able to
make connections from language and identity. I had to use the language that was used in Steve
Jobs speech and make connections to what the audience might of felt as they listened. One other
particular assignment that allowed me to make the connection of a culture to my actual home
culture was the research project. Based on the evidence that I found, I make a connection with
what my personal family did and thought for this issue. For all these essay, there was may
connections that were made as we completed the assignments.
Research was one of the main struggles that I faced while in this course due to its amount
of work and structure. Ive done many research papers in the past, but they required little to no
effort on the assignment itself. The research paper I wrote was about gun control and how it was
the main source that lead to a lot of violence we face today. As I followed my way to completing
this assignment, an annotated bibliography was done. This separate assignment was challenging
to write due to the no use of first person and the structured it required. Much analysis was put
into this assignment simply because they were the sources that were going to be use on the final
paper. The completion of this assignment allowed me to complete course goal number four,
helping students understand textual conventions. By doing this, I chose different genres of
sources that were going to be picked, a video, journals, websites, and database information, and
it followed with an evaluation of each of the sources. Moving on to the actual research proposal

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that was done after that particular assignment, there was much more difficulties. This particular
assignment allowed me to met course goal number one due to the process and expectations
of the essay. This particular goal mentions that students will demonstrate curiosity as well as
risk-taking, and in this case, much more was done. First of all, a topic had to be chosen and with
that topic, we had to know who we were speaking to. My audience in this case was anyone who
was interested in the topic of guns itself as well as the professor, which was the one reading this
assignment. This meant that the essay itself had to be educational as well as informative. Taking
the risk of talking about a particular situation and trying persuade the reader to believe what
youre writing about it complicated. I found this extremely difficult simply because I did not lean
towards one particular side, I was on the fence.
Completing any major important assignments takes time and effort. For this specific
assignment, I decided to create an outline of what I was going to mention trough my cover letter.
Since this assignment focused on reaching each and all of the course goals by the end of the
semester, I made sure that I included any major assignments that were done trough the course in
order to talk about how these goals were met. Before actually determining what assignment
belonged to what goal, many revisions had to be done to each individual assignment.
Understanding the importance of each assignments was ideal in order to continue the process of
finishing this assignment. After this step was completed, it was much easier to write the cover
letter for this portfolio. The outline of this cover letter was completed and filled in with the
different examples I was going to use as well as each course goal it met. The only weakness I did
encounter was repetition of my work and words. It is always as struggle to avoid doing the same
mistake but with more practice and revision, the more I catch these mistakes.

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Writing continues for many more years, and in my future I plan on taking English 20 at
Sacramento State. Since this class is a writing intensive class, I can see myself writing more
research papers, along with persuasive and narrative essay. This class will allow me to put my
skills into work as well as to develop new ones. My techniques of writing are always changing
and improving, and hopefully with this course, I can learn new ways of improving my writing
over all. Looking further into my future, when I am working in the law enforcement field I plan
on doing much more writing. This is, writing reports or tickets on people that I arrest or on any
write ups due to unmet meetings from an offender. This type of writing will have to be clear and
organized, mostly for the judge or the anyone that is reading the report, in order to have a clear
understanding of what occurred for that specific situation.