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English 202
Cover Letter
To whom it may concern,
I have been through other English courses in college thus far the thought of why would this course, English 202-Research writing, be any different? The very first day my professor clearly explained to the class how hard this class would truly be but how clearly astonished we’ll be at all the work we have put into it once it ends. Finishing up my portfolio now I truly am in astonishment at how grown I have become as a writer, researcher and individual this semester.
When we were first deciding our topics I knew what I wanted to do because of my previous Literature class. In that class we studied the “monomyth/hero’s adventure”, which tells a seventeen step story of how it affects us throughout our daily lives. It is created by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell both winning many awards and Pulitzer prizes as authors. I have become fascinated with this idea so I wanted to reflect in my research and my story how it is used throughout my own daily life.
On the pages 1-2 is Anne Lamott’s, “Shitty First Drafts”. This piece has always helped me in my writing because it describes how as writers nothing will be perfect from the start. You have to work at your piece of work like a marathon. Each and every piece will need revised and redone over and over again.
On the next set of pages, 3-8, is my first rough draft that I submitted to my peer reviewer. When I handed it to my classmate, I told them to be brutally honest. Little did I know that he would be that honest, but it worked out for my own benefit entirely. I liked how he told me which parts of my research worked and which parts needed fixed up. I can never thank him enough for that because I used his constructive criticism to the full affect. I think peer-review is important because it has somebody other than yourself read your own paper. When I read my own work I hold a bias against it because I know what it should sound like, however when my partner read it he saw it in many different lights and wanted me to expand on parts that I needed to.
In my final draft of my research paper, pages 9-19, I feel like the strongest part of my research is the beginning of my paper to hook the reader to read even more. I love my topic because everybody I have presented it to seem to have an interest or a fascination as to what I am talking about. I think this is because I laid it out in a format where it does reflect a part of everybody’s life throughout my research and storytelling capabilities.
The best part of this research process was doing the annotated bibliography because it allowed us as researchers to show our citations throughout our paper. I feel as though I used my in a correct format to back up my facts and show what and how they fit into my paper correctly.
My story is formatted to be like a children’s story. In the rough draft I drew pictures but due to my lack of drawing capabilities I decided to get rid of them for the final draft. I think it is better when the reader can incorporate their own imagination throughout the story and then become close to those characters.
I never thought in my years through English classes that I would ever work as hard as I did for this class. Each step of the researching process took us to a low level of, “How the hell am I going to do this?” Yet, to an even higher apotheosis of, “Yes I can!”
