COVER LETTER
Dear Professor Zugnoni,
The past ten weeks of UWP1Y has been a wonderful learning experience for me. The ability to edit and revise my work has been the most important writing skill I got from taking this class, and it is one that I will use for future assignments. Revision through multiple drafts is key to writing a wonderful essay. Both the Wikipedia Entry and Podcast projects allowed me to practice this skill, helping me grow as a writer.
The past ten weeks of UWP1Y has been a wonderful learning experience for me. The ability to edit and revise my work has been the most important writing skill I got from taking this class, and it is one that I will use for future assignments. Revision through multiple drafts is key to writing a wonderful essay. Both the Wikipedia Entry and Podcast projects allowed me to practice this skill, helping me grow as a writer.
I chose Wikipedia Entry project because I am STEM major, and I wanted to work on my writing skills for research papers. Further, this project represents what I have learned in UWP1 because I had to work extremely hard on organization.
This project required me to find multiple secondary sources about my chosen topic. While reading through several possible articles, it was very hard to choose between them to decide which would be most relevant. For my first draft, I included too much information, which resulted in my paper being very disorganized. Luckily, the professor provided some great content about revision and making an outline. Using this feedback about making a reverse outline and writing down the main ideas of each paragraph, I finally realized that I had too many ideas in one paragraph, a lot of which weren’t central to the main idea of my article. Thus, I did my best to move sentences around so that each paragraph focused on one topic or aspect. As a result, my paper looked a lot nicer and was more organized compared to the first draft. Moreover, I also found more relevant credible sources to back up some of the ideas that were previously unsupported.
Compared to the Narrative Project, the Wikipedia Entry was more challenging for me. The feedback I received for this paper from the professor showed me that I had several more flaws to work on. I had done narrative writing many times since I knew how to write. I think it is a good opportunity to practice my research writing skills. Moreover, I want to challenge myself and inform people about more stuff about my country.
This project required me to find multiple secondary sources about my chosen topic. While reading through several possible articles, it was very hard to choose between them to decide which would be most relevant. For my first draft, I included too much information, which resulted in my paper being very disorganized. Luckily, the professor provided some great content about revision and making an outline. Using this feedback about making a reverse outline and writing down the main ideas of each paragraph, I finally realized that I had too many ideas in one paragraph, a lot of which weren’t central to the main idea of my article. Thus, I did my best to move sentences around so that each paragraph focused on one topic or aspect. As a result, my paper looked a lot nicer and was more organized compared to the first draft. Moreover, I also found more relevant credible sources to back up some of the ideas that were previously unsupported.
Compared to the Narrative Project, the Wikipedia Entry was more challenging for me. The feedback I received for this paper from the professor showed me that I had several more flaws to work on. I had done narrative writing many times since I knew how to write. I think it is a good opportunity to practice my research writing skills. Moreover, I want to challenge myself and inform people about more stuff about my country.
For the podcast project, the most challenging aspect of it was choosing my own audience. This project is representative of what I have learned in this class because I practiced concepts such as discourse community and revision.
In my first draft, I chose the wrong audience for my research question: “What can a family do in zoos?” I chose the audience as UC Davis students; however, in the writing, I mentioned “ your children” several times, and referred UC Davis students as parents. I did not think about the fact that most UC Davis students are not parents and probably couldn’t relate to what I was saying. This was the biggest problem because it caused my thesis is be poorly developed. Using the professor’s feedback, I redefined my audience as parents with kids and talked about how I liked to spend time with my family in the zoo when I was a kid. Also, I talked about how I spent time with my little sister there to have more connection with the audience I chose so that they would be inclined to continue listening. After revising this part of the essay, the rest seem easier to fix.
Compared to the Wikipedia Entry, this assignment required that we physically visit the location of choice to not only get some primary sources, but also find some credible secondary sources to finish the podcast project. The Wikipedia Entry only required the use of secondary sources. That is the part that interested me the most because I have never experienced it before.
In my first draft, I chose the wrong audience for my research question: “What can a family do in zoos?” I chose the audience as UC Davis students; however, in the writing, I mentioned “ your children” several times, and referred UC Davis students as parents. I did not think about the fact that most UC Davis students are not parents and probably couldn’t relate to what I was saying. This was the biggest problem because it caused my thesis is be poorly developed. Using the professor’s feedback, I redefined my audience as parents with kids and talked about how I liked to spend time with my family in the zoo when I was a kid. Also, I talked about how I spent time with my little sister there to have more connection with the audience I chose so that they would be inclined to continue listening. After revising this part of the essay, the rest seem easier to fix.
Compared to the Wikipedia Entry, this assignment required that we physically visit the location of choice to not only get some primary sources, but also find some credible secondary sources to finish the podcast project. The Wikipedia Entry only required the use of secondary sources. That is the part that interested me the most because I have never experienced it before.
That being said,the two course learning goals I have mastered are Processing and Researching. As I have mentioned, I have learned a lot through the revision process during writing. The feedbacks from peers and professor are very helpful suggestions, which guided me to make big improvements. For Research, in both projects, we practiced our skill to collect information or data and to synthesis them. During research, I have learned how to find credible sources and how to integrate them properly together.
Simply put, I improved my ability to revise my own work and to write to a specific group of audience. I did this by working a lot on revising my structure, organization, language, and tone for different audiences in two projects. In the Podcast Project, I learned how to communicate with a specific group of audience by revising my language and tone. Both projects taught me to be more organized in my writing, but also gave me a skill as a student. The process of writing an outline for an essay is similar to making a daily task list. Overall, being in UWPIY was an enlightening learning experience.
Sincerely,
Jiahui