Cover Letter

Alex

Dr. deGravelles

Block 1

17 April, 2013

Transformation of a Writer

            In my project, I’ve decided to expand upon my research paper, create a billboard of my blog about expectations of actions, transform my hits, blog post, Nyasha’s Persona and Determining Strength, and improve my misses which consisted of my blog post, Becoming a leader on the court, and my literary analysis.  I chose these pieces of writing because I feel like they have the most potential and everything can use a little improvement.

 My research paper was a about Title IX which is a law that deals with female sports.  I decided to tweak my thesis a little bit, take out extraneous information, and expand upon the little details that make up my paper.  I visited the writing center, and my writing fellow has been a tremendous help.

The billboard I’m creating is based on my blog post, Expectations of Actions, except I’ve decided to look at it from a different point of view.  Instead of expectations of actions, I decided to do expectations versus actions because everyone knows what is expected of them whether it’s from your teachers, coaches, parents, peers, or even yourself, but it only matters if you reach those expectations by doing the right actions.  I feel like my hits were Nyasha’s Persona because I felt I like I did a good job putting myself into the character’s shoes, and my poem, Determining Strength, because it was very personal, my first poem, and I felt very confident about it.  My misses, not including my research paper, were my literary analysis, and my blog post titled “Becoming a Leader on the Court.”  I felt like I was very repetitive in my literary analysis, but I just worded my point of view in a different way each time.  In my blog post, I think that I could’ve expanded upon certain aspects of the piece and could have potentially turned it into a full paper.

            Over the past three quarters, I’ve noticed that as a writer myself, is that I’m not afraid to try out different genres of writing.  What I like about English 1 is that it pushed me into new territory that I had never experienced before.  At the beginning of the year, I had no clue what a literary analysis was or that I would become a poet and write my own poem.  Although I never really had that much trouble branching out to different styles, I noticed that I didn’t give up.  I kept trying by improving draft after draft until it was near perfect.  As a writer and even on the WrAP test, I always struggled with conventions and voice.  I was just blown away when I saw that voice was on a rubric for an essay.  I immediately thought that it was impossible to show your voice on paper, but I learned that there is a certain way that I can bring my paper to life by the creativity and the word choice.  Conventions were something that I just sort of had to learn, like when and when not to use a semicolon or a comma.  Thankfully, I know that I just need to learn the proper grammar rules so that I won’t get points deducted off for silly errors..  My strengths, which have basically been consistent since 3^rd grade, are word choice and organization.  With the exception of one paper, that I am revising, I had little to no trouble with these traits.  Word choice just comes natural to me because I like to be able to create a picture in my readers’ minds, and explain myself thoroughly.  Organization takes a lot of time, and since I put a lot of effort into my drafts and graphic organizers, it shows on my final papers.

            As a writer, I am very diverse. I am not afraid to take on a challenge.  I find myself to be very well rounded, but like in everyone else, there is always room for improvement.  I actually have more potential than I originally thought I had and all I needed was a challenge to push me so that I could see what I am really capable of.