Dear Matt,

Through the process of writing and revising WPs this quarter, I learned a lot about the
importance of the process of drafting and revision. As I did in-class edits and received feedback
before going on to further drafts in the Pb-Wb process, I noticed that with each draft, I was
able to learn a bit more about how I could improve my writing. Drafting used to be difficult for
me because I would always try to have all of my words perfect in one sitting. But when I read
about shitty first drafts in this class, I learned to see writing as a process of baby steps. Before
this class I only did final drafts. Now Ive come to see that there is never truly a final draft
and that writing can always be improved.

In addition to drafting and revising, I also gained a stronger foothold on how all of the concepts
of convention, genre, rhetoric, and discourse community connect. WP1 introduced me to the
effect that conventions have on determining genre. WP2 introduced me to how conventions and
rhetoric within genres serve discourse communities. WP3 allowed me to apply my knowledge of
these concepts creatively (which I had a really great time doing!).

The most impressionable skill that this course taught me was on how to control language flow. I
used to always have a very hard time with connecting my ideas with one another into a constant
stream. Somewhere in my essays, my ideas would always end up hopping around from one to
another and it was never easy for the reader to follow. Learning about transitions, indexes and
stresses, and keeping paragraphs structured by topic really helped me to address my prior woes.

I appreciated the time that you took to go over introductions. I think introductions are very tricky
for a lot of people, and many times in my life Ive had teachers attempt to explain them to me but
the art of writing an introduction was mostly glossed over. You took the time to go in depth and
even go so far as to speak beyond structure, but about how we, as writers, could incorporate our
own styles into introductions. I feel that in this course, I learned a bit about my individual writing
style, so I think the only thing I would want to know a bit more about is how I could safely go
about writing in my style while still staying in the lines of an essay.

For my portfolio, I used WP2 and WP3. I revised these WPs because I feel that as the course
went by, I should have been improving with each new writing assignment. Because this is a new
writing assignment, I want to fix the errors that I did not address in the most previous works that
I have finished.

For WP2, I did a lot of serious revision on concision. I had to do one long round of extracting all
of the repetitive language first. I then went back and revised any overly-long phrases I had that
could be worded in a simpler, more comprehensive way. I then heeded the advice that was given
to me in my rubric and took my long sentences and tried to cut them in half. While doing all of
this, I made sure I was reading my writing as though I was a first-time reader. In my re-reads, I
noticed that I needed to do a lot of revision on my information flow. A lot of my ideas were
intact, but they were not well-strung together, so it would make sense that any first-time reader
would get lost in my argument.

The feedback about rewriting sentences as though you were explaining them to a younger
cousin was extremely helpful for me when I went in to attack my lack of concision. Your rubric
point on how I need to be more specific in my citations helped me a lot as well. I went back on
my essay because of this and made sure my citations were clear and that they all had
correspondingly clear analysis to follow.

For my WP3, I had to work on my concision as well. I still used the same advice that you gave to
cut my long sentences in half. I also heeded your suggestions on making more specific citations
on the genre I chose to translate the article into. For instance, I chose childrens book genre, and
so I cited the childrens book, Dr. Seuss ABC. I also made sure to go more in depth on my
analysis of my citations while still cutting down my wordiness. In addition to fixes to concision,
I also made repairs to any broken areas of information flow. Many times I noticed breaks in my
essay where my train of thought fell off. I had to keep a conscious effort of stresses and indexes
when rewriting to keep my train of thought.wellon track.

In my WP3 I didnt elaborate as much on what I learned from the classs writing sources, and a
lot of this had to do with the fact that because I had used so many words before, I felt that I had
no more space for anymore analysis or expansion on my ideas! After I had already done my
rounds (as I said above) of revising wordiness, however, I found that I was able to add in more
elaboration on how integrated ideas from the class readings into my work.

Out of all of the feedback, I personally found the feedback from the rubric to be most helpful. In
addition, I like that I was able to take my work and cut it down in size while still maintaining its

substance. The one thing I struggled on, however, was adding a great deal of new depth in to the
WPs while taking out my wordiness. I feel that I still did so, but it was most definitely a
struggle.

This work in my portfolio reflect all the claims I made at the beginning of this letter. I learned a
great deal about drafting, revision, language flow, and in addition, a lot about my writing style.
And my biggest re-occurring writing error of needing to fix my conscision. As a writer, my old
perspective of writing has changed from seeing it as that of something very formatted and strict,
to something that you can have a lot of freedom in if you approach it gracefully.

This writing class will not only help me in the future, it has already helped me this quarter! Ive
gotten As in all of my papers for Japanese History and I know that this class helped spur those
As because I remember thinking about the writing conventions that my TA (the audience) would
expect when reading my essay. As I was writing my essays for the class, I was constantly
referring back to writing skills that I had learned in this class. I know that due to this class, in the
future my writing will have more improved information flow and that the reader will be able to
trace through my argument and have a clear understanding of my writing objectives for whatever
the work may be.

Sincerely,
Katherine Cho