Final Portfolio Cover Letter

             Writing 39B has become a very challenging class for me because I have been practice writing for a long time. Because the topic of the class is kind of new to me, I have never read about any dystopias before and Zamyatin’s We, and I feel it so interesting. After all the in class discussion and major assignments after class have improved my abilities to write. Especially in during the part of in class discussion, I feel it very helping to have peer reviews during the class because it helps me strengthen and improve my writing, some of the peers have incredible thought about the writings and their idea can be so open minded for me. Throughout the whole course, I think I have earned a b for the class since I have improved through the leaning but I

still lack some skills which can be developed through much more practices and more comprehensive reading.

             I think that I have devote much time in my rip project, however it need more time to develop and I were not able to make enough improvements. One of the most import parts of the grade for my ability improvement is showing that I am capable of presenting my project’s main idea. At the beginning of my project, I want to develop my project into a decent mystery short story, but the story I have settled has a far too complicated plot for me to handle and present. After discussing with the professor I decided to change my genre into a game and my main project will the descriptions of different scenes, so in the later draft I made changes to the RIP project and make it more reasonable and easy to understand. There are two reason for me to make such great change to the whole project. On one hand, the part where I have made the biggest change in draft one is changing from a large number of descriptive words to direct descriptions of dialogue between the two characters, which can reduce the effects that players taking from the environments and focus their attention on the conversation on the characters because the in my background setting those two main characters have never met each other till the end of the story, and their only communication method is using radio. In my RIP the radio is an important tool and nearly all the information is coming from it so the dialogues are important in presenting the whole story.

            Another reason for me to choose to change my RIP project’s genre is that give attention to the development of the modern society after some research I find out that the print media has been losing its dominant position in medias since the further development of the internet, which I considered as the rise of electronic media. And among those medias game is a media which consists of visual, acoustic and interactive elements. Moreover, making good use of those elements will be a perfect way to reproduce my thought. Furthermore, an electronic content will be easy to spread all over the world through internet, thus if published, my project will have more audience. And I have devoted a lot of effort in developing the dialogues which in my opinion take effect in the scene description.

            And in my last draft of my RIP project, professor told me that only write scenes of the game with a lot of dialogues will be a little bit strange and I learnt how to develop my project by combining the scenes which I am working on into an interview written by others, thus some minor changes are needed to be made to fix the dialogues between characters to fit the interview and I have tried my best in order to improve the reading experience and show the improvement of my RIP project.

            In my RA, I was very excited to do an analysis of Zamyatin’s We, which is one of the best dystopias in the world. The RA itself is also a cumulative work to show how I have improved a lot, at the introduction and body paragraph homework, I have nearly no idea about how exactly a rhetorical analysis essay can be completed, until I get some hints from the professor and peer reviews in class gives me a lot of useful ideas and basic structures about how I can finish my project in a good way. Especially during the peer review session in class, I can get to know different classmate’s way of presenting their idea and get to know how can I develop my thesis through a smooth transition of words.

            I prefer to express my opinions through the comparison of historical facts with example picked up from the novel, and I have made decent research on the Bolsheviks Revolution in Russia which is reflected by the story, though I cannot find much examples from the educational websites but I do find some on Wikipedia and other sources to further develop my own thesis statement. On the other hand, examples I picked up from class texts by Beauchamp and Leatherbarrow really inspired me and help me further engrave my topic sentence of several paragraphs.

            Moreover, in writing 39B, one of the choice I made to improve my writing is get prepared for the peer view. Every minor home work also does a great job in improving my writing skill, every time when I am doing the brainstorming homework I will find so many interesting ideas to develop in my mind and I am able to pick up what I have the most interest and develop it through writing an outline for it and take it to peer review to get some ideas from others to see if it will be a good thesis to develop. And keeping putting more content through the discussion is a good way to improve my writing because I think sometimes one’s thesis is not interesting to others. Those peer reviews taught me the importance of hearing from audience in order to improve writing and the disadvantages of individual work.