Portfolio+Cover+Letter

Tyler Bell English 103 December 13, 2010 Portfolio Cover Letter

Dear Dr. Hartman, I’ve had plenty of writing experiences before this course. High school was filled with English classes, two of which were Advanced Placement classes. I ended up writing more than I ever thought I would or even could. To this day I have saved notebooks from my previous English classes that are filled with my notes, free writes, and rough drafts of the pieces that I wrote. I feel that I’ve come a long way from where I was and that my writing style has evolved more and more with each piece I write. I feel that this class was, in all honesty, a lot easier than my Senior English class in High School. Over the course of the year in that class we had weekly readings, weekly journals, weekly vocabulary tests, and 4-5 papers with other smaller writing in between those. In all though, I feel that class greatly prepared me for your class. The upbeat pace of my first semester with all of my classes, along with the guidance of my former English teacher, I was able to stay on track and become successful. Because of my previous English classes, I was fairly well prepared for this class and found most of the writings relatively easy for me to accomplish. The one assignment that made me reach beyond my comfort and even skill level was the multi-genre essay. In all of my previous assignments I’ve been given a very concrete form and basis to start from, this was not the case. This assignment had virtually no requirements or guidelines to follow. We were alone to set up our own piece of work. I think that this lack of guidelines made me reach out of my comfort zone in my writing abilities. It made me change my writing style and how I think about my writing at this point. The Multi-Genre essay was an assignment like none that I had ever worked on before in any English course. In the beginning I had absolutely no clue where to even begin on this paper. I sat down for hours drafting up plans of what I could do, or even write about. When I finally came up with the topic of writing about my family, the planning for the structure of the paper became the main focus. I feel that I’ve expressed more creativity in this paper than any I’ve ever written before. The feedback that I’ve received in this course on my papers and other writings from you, and from classmates has been exponentially helpful. In my previous courses, peer reviews and commentary was always very vague and unhelpful. The feedback that I would receive from our class was actually helpful and it helped me to make my writing better. One of my major problems with my writing techniques is that once I write something and feel it’s actually complete, I have trouble finding the errors I’ve made, not matter how obvious they might be. As for my writing in the future, I feel that this class has helped me out quite a bit. This class has allowed me to become more confident in my writing. The various genres that we wrote in also helped widen my styles and abilities of writing. I think that my main problem that I had with my writing before coming into this course was my confidence in my writing, and my creativity. Up until this point I never had to really try creative writing such as the multi-genre essay. Most of my High School career was spent writing research papers that were strictly facts and didn’t take much creativity at all. My confidence level is always low for the fear that I will do poorly on a paper, but I’ve found that I’m not having that problem much anymore. The only advice that I can give myself is to stay confident in my work and not be afraid to think outside of the box when it comes to how I write.