Dear Professor Johnson,

First of all, thank you for taking the time to read my final writing portfolio. This portfolio
consists of my revised work in Writing Project 1 and Writing Project 2, which I have been
working on and revising throughout the quarter. For my first writing project, I translated the
article “How AI can be a force for good” from Science magazine into a BuzzFeed news article. I
paid close attention to diction, tone, formatting, and other genre conventions to create a
translation that encompassed the original article’s main ideas. Also, another component of
Writing Project 1 is an analytical essay where I go into detail about the choices and strategies I
used to create my genre translation. In Writing Project 2, I present the conversation surrounding
the effectiveness of timed writing assessments and other writing assignments in the format of a
letter addressed to my friend. In the letter, I give a brief history of writing assessments and
quickly divert to explaining the scholars’ different viewpoints.
In WP1, my changes and edits were somewhat limited but still significant. One of the
comments you gave me was about changing my sentence structure to engage in an active voice
instead of a passive voice as a writer. In the analytical essay of my genre translation, one of my
sentences went as follows: “the essence of Artificial Intelligence(AI) and its ethical
repercussions on humanity if left unchecked are conveyed straightforwardly.” The underlined
portion represents me writing in the passive voice as I am not indicating who is doing the action
of “conveying(which is myself in this case.) I reformatted this sentence in the final draft to
clearly indicate that I am the one who is conveying the message throughout the translation. My
most significant changes were in the translation itself. In the genre translation, I left out what the
article had in terms of solutions to use AI more ethically, so I included paraphrases of what
Taddeo stated needs to be done by organizations and the general public to ensure AI is used
ethically going forward. In my translated BuzzFeed article, I added a new paragraph to house
these ideas. I liked how my paragraphs and ideas flowed in my original submission of WP1, so I
did not change any paragraphs’ order. Still, I mainly focused on making each paragraph more
cohesive and clear for the reader. I omitted unnecessary words, phrases and made sure my
sentences flowed smoothly between paragraphs.
My WP2 second draft was not as complete in comparison to my WP1 at that same stage.
I was missing citations, aspects of chronology, elaboration on core ideas, and much more. I think
the most noteworthy changes are the attention to chronology and elaboration of core ideas. I
mentioned big ideas such as “writing as a social process” and “writing as an iterative process” in
my original draft but merely breezed over them without defining them to my letter’s recipient. In
my final draft, I spent time explaining these terms in the words of the scholars in the
conversation, which made my letter more complete and informative. In addition, I made sure to
reference the dates of each author’s contribution to the conversation to give my reader insight
into how it all unfolded. I also indicated who the older participants were. One example is when I
described Edward White as a “veteran” participant as he was one of the first scholars in the
conversation with his 1995 article “An apologia for the timed impromptu essay.” Besides those
topics, I focused once again on cohesion and clarity, reading sentence by sentence to ensure I am
as concise and informative as possible.
Aside from the unique assignments, several other factors contributed to my understanding
of writing this quarter. Class readings are a factor that played a large role in helping me
understand writing in new ways. For instance, Laura Bolin Caroll’s “Backpacks vs. Briefcases”
helped me out in my first writing project because of her explanation that “the tone of the writing
and whether that tone is appropriate for the given context helps build a writer’s
credibility”(Caroll, 2010, p.54). After learning how an appropriate tone can build credibility, I
ensured that my translation had the appropriate tone for the context of a BuzzFeed article.
Another essential reading for me was Mike Bunn’s “How to read like a writer,” where he
explains that when someone reads like a writer, they look to identify choices the author made to
make those choices more effectively in their own writing(Bunn, 2011). By further investigating
various aspects of writing such as genre, rhetoric, diction, and appeals, I learned to read writing
with more purpose than before. I began identifying the author’s style and rhetorical choices and
started understanding how they built their arguments by using one or more of these elements.
Reading to understand more than just the main ideas in a piece of writing ultimately helped me
become a better writer over the course of the quarter.
What I enjoyed about this quarter was that we used Nectir discussions to discuss our
weaknesses and strengths in our writing, which I now understand is a form of metacognitive
reflection. For me, I think my biggest strength as a writer is my ability to outline and then write
an essay based on the outline I created. Ever since high school, I was never one of the people
who could do very well drafting an essay without a rough outline, so it became a habit for me to
always start with an outline(that is usually in bullet point form) to get all of my ideas from my
head to the document. Then I would then find the main idea and disregard the others to create my
outline. After I got to that stage, writing a draft was a seamless process for me. Another strength
of my writing is my analytical skills. Based on my high school experiences, I am also good at
analyzing literature pieces for things like overarching themes, literary techniques, and character
development and clearly express that in the analysis portion of my essays. Furthermore, I also
think I’m good at writing in a way that flows well. An example of this is in WP2, when I
transition from one point of view on timed writing assessments to another, I start the next
paragraph with the phrase “By contrast, …” to make sure these two differing views flow into one
another.
The biggest weakness in my writing is my first draft writing. I’ve always had a habit of
writing one sentence and then making sure it is perfect before going to the next. This drastically
slows down my drafting process and drains my energy, leaving me unmotivated with barely
anything to show for my efforts. This habit made in-class writing difficult for me because I
would always question the last sentence I’ve written down and convince myself that it isn’t good
enough. I now have almost eliminated this habit after incorporating techniques like second-order
thinking and by understanding that it is okay for my first drafts to be “shitty.” Reading articles
like Anne Lammot’s “Shitty First Drafts” gave me some reassurance in my first draft writing as
she explained that even the best of the best writers often have no clue what they are trying to
convey in their writing until they actually write it(Lammot, 1994). I learned that sometimes the
best thing I can do as a writer is mind dump onto a document and go from there.
As I mentioned in my second writing project, if I had more time, I would enjoy following
a different conversation from another field and working on a similar writing project where I
could continue to practice my first draft writing and conversation tracing abilities. Other than
that, I think I would just want to spend more time reading similar articles to those we read during
the quarter to further my understanding of writing.

Thank you for everything this quarter,

Rohit Kavuluru
References

Carroll, Laura. "Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis." Writing
Spaces: Readings on Writing. Lowe, Charles, and Pavel Zemliansky. Parlor Press.
45-58. Print.

Lamott, Anne. "Shitty First Draft." Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New
York: Anchor, 1994. 21-27. Print.

Bunn, M. (2011). How to Read Like a Writer. Retrieved December 16, 2020, from
https://gauchospace.ucsb.edu/courses/pluginfile.php/10584650/mod_resource/content/4/Bunn%2
0-%20How-to-Read-Like-a-Writer.pdf