April 23, 2002

Dear Dr. Koster,

In my portfolio of deliberative writing, you will see that the work I chose has been improved to the best of my ability. At the beginning of the semester I told myself that I was not going to be good at writing. I was very weak at getting my papers off to a great start, organizing my thoughts, and using commas. Every time I began to write a paper, I had all of these great thoughts that I would write down, but starting my papers off with a strong thesis or a strong argument was something that I was just not good at. I thought that I was doomed, because if my papers had a stupid beginning, my audience would not want to read it. They would probably roll it up to swat flies and gnats with it in the summer.

With help from the writing center, you and myself, I have rewritten almost all of the beginnings of my three papers. I would like for you to note how much stronger they are. Also note that in many places throughout my papers where I continually used the word "this" to refer to something, I replaced "this" with the actual thing I wanted to say. I believe that by cutting down the use of "This" my reader would stay into my papers and be interested in them from the beginning to the end.

In many of my papers I became comma happy. My writing teacher in high school always said that if you were not sure where to put commas, say the sentence aloud and put in a comma wherever you pause. Maybe that was okay in some cases, but I can clearly see that it is not always the case here. I am very weak when it comes to putting commas in the proper place, I must have missed that day in English class. However, in my revised editions you will find little or no comma splices in these three papers. I’ve learned how fix that major problem by going to the writing center also. You can either make it into two sentences, keep the comma and add a coordinating conjunction (FANBOY), or you can use a semicolon. Boy, those people in the writing center are very helpful and smart, they know everything!

My last major problem, organizing appropriately was a big thing in two of my papers, my paper on the Texaco issue and my analysis of logic. Every thought that comes to mind, I just write it down. They are all good thoughts in my opinion, so I have trouble with how to properly incorporate them into my papers. You will clearly see that I have attacked this problem like a lioness to her prey. The work enclosed in this portfolio flows smoothly and it is much easier to establish who my audience is and what I wanted to say.

When reading my paper, "You Should Have Known Better," you will see all the critical changes I made to make it flow a little smoother. When starting this paper I was overwhelmed with the fact that it had to be seven pages long. I thought I would never be able to meet that requirement. My approach to this paper was very scattered; highly unorganized in my opinion. I had so many emotions about the issue that I just ran wild with the entire thing. I believe that I already had a strong introduction so I did not change that at all, I just cleaned it up a little. Near the middle and end I just was not able to be calm about the issue any longer. This is when my feelings broke loose. The name calling started and I came down very hard on the people involved in the entire issue at times.

After reading your comments about my paper, I realized that this one needed the most work. Revising this paper was hard for me because I wanted to keep all of the name calling in my paper and stuff like that. I realized that by getting rid of the name calling and by easing up off my emotions a little my paper would be much better. Please notice how much I managed to gain control of my raging emotions and set one tone in this piece. That was a main goal for me in this paper and I feel very strongly that I have met this goal.

The paper about languages was my favorite. In my paper "To Censor or Not To Censor" I felt that I got off to a great start. I am sure that I grabbed my audience’s attention with this one. The amount of emotion involved in this paper was much less that the one I wrote about Texaco, so my tone was constant throughout and I did not have that many problems keeping things organized. Major problems that I faced and fixed in this paper were documentation, punctuation, and subject/verb agreement. I felt awful that I had so many mistakes in that paper, and that is the main reason why I wanted to revise this one especially. Again, please notice how much easier this paper is to read and understand due to my revisions. This paper is much stronger that the first draft because I realized my mistakes and fixed them instead of trying to cover them up. I hope you enjoy this one.

The last paper you should read is my analysis of logic. In the revised copy, you will see how I stuck to analyzing the logic and not other points in the paper. I reread the letter and took my time in analyzing the logic to make this paper much better. I believe that in my first draft of this paper I was focused more on actually trying to finish the paper and leave class than analyzing the logic. Notice especially how I was able to break down the article to find most of the fallacies in the logic.

At the beginning of the course I was a die hard procrastinator; this was not a good thing. It hurt my organizational skills along with my ability to take my time and do documentation correctly. Later on in the course I realized that if I wrote a few paragraphs or a page a night depending on the required length my entire paper would get done without rushing it and come out more interesting.

I have put a lot of work into revising and perfecting my works. I entered this class at the beginning of the semester unsure about a lot of things as you saw earlier, but throughout the course the weakness named at the beginning of this letter have been strengthened. I am still a little weak with my documentation and works cited, but I will continue to work on that so I won’t be called a plagiarist in the future.

I have also learned-how to look at the task of having to write a paper not as a terrible thing anymore; it’s become fairly easy with the help of this course. By pacing myself and not trying to write an entire paper in one night the development of my papers has become much better. I know that I am a better writer.

Sincerely Yours,

Lisa Simpson